Jake Novak, "What Makes an 'Elite' School?"
David Shasha
What Makes an ‘Elite’ School?
By: Jake Novak
Before I begin my rant on this – and there is certainly much ranting to do! – for the sake of full disclosure it must honestly be said at the very start that Sephardim are losers.
Yes – LOSERS.
Those Sephardim who do not want to be losers become Ashkenazim.
Those Sephardim who become Ashkenazim are inundated with and corroded by self-hatred.
This, of course, is by no means an impediment to “success.” But it does beg the question – which this vile article raises for the conscientious reader: What do we really mean by the term “success”?
To get a sense of what the Yeshivah of Flatbush High School is, here is some background from the SHU:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/flatbush/davidshasha/UZ9tN7Z2TAY/8pk5tGyNP4sJ
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/flatbush/davidshasha/jJ47QpSjZ4w/qfwHMoTm6MEJ
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/flatbush/davidshasha/FIS0m_ZMxE4/WNFCgC4z0qgJ
Due to the gradual exodus of Modern Orthodox Ashkenazim from the Midwood neighborhood here in Brooklyn as the Haredim increased in number, what was once a majority Ashkenazi school is now a majority Sephardi school. When the Sephardim were still a minority – and that includes my own tenure as a student there – the prejudice against Sephardim and Sephardic culture was fairly strong.
http://forward.com/culture/130141/a-peaceful-coexistence-remains-despite-student-tur/
I have addressed the matter in the context of Yeshiva University and its own racism:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/davidshasha/a93EykBERUk/rA34Yg5U6oAJ
When asked by a Syrian Jewish student why there were no Sephardi writers included in his Introduction to Modern Hebrew Literature course, the position of that YU professor was that Sephardic Jews in Israel are “poor and stupid.”
Now the “Idiot Sephardim” are an extremely clever and predatory lot whose success in business has been due to their aggression and lack of ethics. Book learning has never been for them.
Back in the bad old days of YOFHS when it was still majority Ashkenazi, the parents of the despised Sephardi students were routinely shaken down for money. Their children largely seen as morons, the administration of the school saw a great opportunity to cash in and extort as much money as they could from the Syrian Jews. This was a well-known fact that only changed when the Ashkenazim abandoned the school and the Syrians took over.
This being said, a cadre of Ashkenazified Modern Orthodox Syrians – led by people like Raymond Harari, Ezra Labaton, and Moshe Shamah – turned the community around as it rejected its Sephardic heritage:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/labaton/davidshasha/ASZ9YE5oJSE/fCqSmRp4PN8J
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/flatbush/davidshasha/fqNkqS3zv4w/pyYTGcSo97UJ
We have, to paraphrase the author of the Song of Songs, tended someone else’s vineyard and left our own to go fallow.
The current ethos of the YOFHS is one that is alien to the Sephardic tradition and is producing a group of students that is more Ashkenazi than Sephardi.
Admirers of the school like to characterize this as “progress”!
With all this in mind, it is critical to understand that the YOFHS was way ahead of its time when it came to “teaching for the test.”
The “secret” to the “success” that Mr. Novak champions is that educational substance comes a distant second to the actual skills that now constitute what it means to be wealthy.
It is not for nothing that Novak is working on something called “Power Lunch” on CNBC.
The YOFHS has for a long time drilled its students in the shortest and simplest way to “make it.” As a hopelessly naïve and somewhat idealistic newcomer to the Flatbush way of doing things, I got the impression that cheating was rampant and that students would expend more effort lobbying teachers for higher grades than they did in studying and working to absorb educational content. I first became aware of the existence of “Cliff Notes” when as a Freshman I received a C on my first English literature quiz and discovered that my classmates – unlike me – barely read a page of David Copperfield, the assigned text, but already had the crib notes memorized. They also discovered the AMSCO review books which the teachers used and that helped out on final exams, many of whose questions would come from such review guides.
This undermines the integrity of the educational process, but it is a short-cut into the fast-lane of “success,” and YOFHS students are made aware of this very quickly in their academic career. Sink or swim, the culture of the school is to demand “success” because that is the way of the world.
As I prepare these comments, I have in one of my Internet tabs the following article by Robert Reich which shows us what the “real world” is like these days:
And here is one from The New Republic about how our elite colleges are producing corporate stooges:
Most Americans are insecure, while at the same time most YOFHS graduates are thriving in a repressive corporatized culture. It is the perfect storm of “education” in the proverbial shark-tank. Learning to “succeed” is much more advantageous than learning to be intelligent and ethical human beings. Sephardic Religious Humanism is for chumps!
Indeed, this concept of “success” has a good deal to do with what values are inculcated in the student and how they relate to fellow students and to the world at large.
YOFHS has always had a cruel and predatory culture that is actually – pace the Sephardi losers – a great incubator of “success” as it is now understood in our hopelessly corrupted society. The school has always been way ahead of the curve in this respect.
And this was a critical shift in the value-system of the Syrian-Sephardic community that was once led by the giant Hakham Matloub Abadi; whose mission was violently cut down by Isaac Shalom:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/matloub/davidshasha/dpebJezm5Ic/rvQ82UnIALkJ
Rabbi Abadi was one of those Sephardi “losers” who naively believed that Torah was the proper foundation of a Jewish life and “success” meant being a good person who had moral integrity.
“Success” in the CNBC world of Jim Cramer is not exactly that:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Stewart%27s_2009_criticism_of_CNBC
We will also remember the Bernie Madoff scandal and its roots in the Modern Orthodox Jewish community:
http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/new-york/madoff-five-years-later
http://forward.com/opinion/137655/the-jewish-roots-of-madoffs-crime/
These, of course, are the “winners”; successful until they are caught with their hand in the till and then sent to jail, like the great Willie Rapfogel:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/rapfogel/davidshasha/Q96cejsCjFM/qJYTOBye-3wJ
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/24/nyregion/rapfogel-sentenced-for-stealing-from-charity.html?_r=0
Let’s call a spade a spade here: The Modern Orthodox Jews, as our good friend David Brooks has argued, like the “good life,” and money is no object:
We are not supposed to speak about Jewish greed and the bad behavior that its spawns, but what the Novak article is speaking about is not erudite and educated people who live by a strong moral code rooted in Torah values, but individuals who are largely fanatical in their Zionist politics; who are not committed intellectuals; who are not devoted to the American open society; and whose primary value is to amass money and power in a world of perceived Anti-Semites.
When all you want is money – as the cliché goes – money is not very hard to come by. YOFHS students are carefully counseled in a very aggressive expediency: How is it that I can best succeed in this economy and what does it take to maintain a lavish lifestyle?
According to these metrics, I have absolutely no argument with Novak. His “logic” is impeccable.
The problem only begins when we use a different metric to assess “success” and begin to look at the deep antipathy that the “Idiot Sephardim” have for their heritage. If one looks at the current state of that heritage – as I do regularly – then the vaunted “success” Novak speaks of does not amount to much. Self-knowledge is not valued in this mad rush to become a “winner.”
More than this, when we use Torah values as a metric, YOFHS – as I have said before – fails completely. The fanatical Zionism is coupled with a mercenary ethos that has become a veritable religion for such people. It speaks to the New Jewish Macho; a matter that I have discussed more generally in my article on Adam Sandler’s “You Don’t Mess with the Zohan”:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/macho/davidshasha/luE60edC1eQ/zwODKh7eYDQJ
So while the YOFHS community is indeed a “success,” the measure of such success is quite different from anything that my grandparents would have understood as success. The many YOFHS graduates who have gone on to the Ivy League and to financial well-being have indeed shown up the “loser” Sephardim and made an even stronger case for dumping our heritage. They are “smart” and we are “stupid.”
But for those who value integrity, knowledge, and moral decency, the current model of “success” that we see espoused in Novak’s article – the sort of thing that would make the odious Jim Cramer KVELL – is not all that it is cracked up to be.
DS
Did your child not get accepted to the elite college of his or her choice earlier this month? Are you freaking out because now you think he or she will have to go to a lower-ranked school? A lot of educational, economic, and social experts have written a lot of good things about how this needn't be a terrible blow to your child's future. And I'd like to add to that wisdom, but not by focusing on college. Because if you're looking to give your kids a better education and a better path to financial and career success, college is not the place to start.
Just about everyone agrees that a superior education is still the best bet to make it in this country. Count me among that group, but with some important disclaimers. First, I don't believe a great education necessarily means going to a highly-ranked college, even if that college is an Ivy League school. And second, it's entirely ridiculous for parents and kids to freak out over the college application process. Great educations, to be truly called that, have to begin earlier. I would argue that means the parents have to start properly educating their children themselves right from birth. But it also means the focus should be on the middle school to high school years at the very latest.
But how do you know which school is best when it comes to measuring your child's chances for success in adult life? It's not as easy a question to answer as you might think, because the best middle and secondary schools in America measured by curricula, faculty and test scores aren't necessarily the best when you check back with the graduates of those schools 10, 20 or 30 years later. Based on what I've seen from my own educational path, I've come to realize that the geography and community surrounding a school are probably more important when it comes to measuring its alumni success.
I don't put too much emphasis on luck, but I do try to acknowledge where I've been fortunate. And I was truly fortunate to have been born into a two-parent home with a mom and dad who placed my and my sister's education on the top of their priorities. That remained true regardless of where we lived. And that's why the two best schools I ever attended were in totally different parts of the country and didn't resemble each other very much in any other way either. The one common denominator was that my parents carefully decided to send me to them.
In my elementary school years, they sent me briefly to Norfolk Academy in the Tidewater region of Virginia. While it was not a boarding school, it had many of the same trappings. It was founded in 1728, (not a typo, and yes that is four years before George Washington was born), had a rigorous admission exam, sit-down meals served at lunch family style, a full slate of foreign language, fine arts, and athletics requirements, etc. I was just a pre-teen when I went to Norfolk Academy, but it remains the most rigorous academic challenge I ever faced in my life and that includes my four years at an Ivy League college. The only reason why I didn't spend more years at Norfolk Academy was because my family moved to New York in 1981. But what I learned there both academically and socially plays a profound role in my decisions and thought processes to this day.
The other school that influenced me the most was extremely different. It was my all-Jewish, Modern Orthodox high school called the Yeshivah of Flatbush located on the very urban streets of the Midwood section of Brooklyn. Flatbush was a tough school too, particularly because failure to learn Hebrew fluently basically meant you weren't going to graduate. But the priorities there were different. Superior college admissions were somewhat important to both the parents and the administration at my high school, but not the top priority by a long shot. Our teachers there wanted to make sure we grew up to be productive and valuable members of the Jewish community. Part of that was religious instruction, but Flatbush was and is unique for its extensive Zionism education that included a historic, political and cultural immersion into all things Israel. That emphasis naturally led to school-sponsored activism, not only for the State of Israel but also, (in my high school years of the 1980s), Soviet Jewry and the plight of the remaining Jews trapped in Arab lands. Norfolk Academy focused on the whole student as well, particularly by requiring a complete set of extracurricular activities with a special emphasis on the arts. Athletics were also a major part of life at the Academy, something that was barely on the radar at Flatbush. To be frank, Norfolk Academy did and does a better job providing its students every skill that you'd think would give a young person a better chance at succeeding in the secular business or political world as an adult.
But consider this: while Norfolk Academy had a superior secular curriculum, a more prestigious faculty, and a better path to elite college acceptance, the funny thing is the graduates of my Jewish high school in Brooklyn are more successful when strictly measured by the criteria of career success, aggregate wealth, and even political prominence. And this is true of an entire era of graduates from the years 1960-2000. It's the Yeshivah of Flatbush, and not Norfolk Academy, that has two Nobel Prize winners among its alumni from that period. It's the Yeshivah of Flatbush that has Pulitzer winners. It's Yeshivah of Flatbush alumni who you're more likely to find at the highest levels of government and in the private sector.
Diversity of career choices and gender disparity also present a stark contrast. Grab five graduates from Norfolk Academy from the classes of 1960-2000 and you'd be hard pressed to find three of them who don' t have the same job. Grab five graduates from Yeshivah of Flatbush from the classes of 1960-2000 and you'd be hard-pressed to find three people who DO have the same job.
And then there's gender comparisons. Put aside any prejudices you might have about career roles for religious Jewish women, because almost every woman from my class of 1988 is not only employed full-time, but self-employed. Entrepreneur is the most common job title among them. And that's despite the fact that most of the female graduates are also mothers of more than the average 2-3 children apiece. In fact, many of my female high school classmates began having children very soon after graduation and are already grandmothers.
I want to make it clear that Norfolk Academy alumni are also elite in just about every way. It would be ridiculous for anyone to even try to portray the N.A. alumni in anything but the most positive light. This is not a "good vs. bad" comparison, but an examination of why one school's alumni have outperformed outsider expectations.
The big question is "why?" Why do the alumni of the one school I attended that puts less emphasis on elite college preparation, with less funding per student to boot, outperform? In hopes of finding an answer, I asked two top administrators at Flatbush today who were also there when I was a student 30 years ago.
Head of School Rabbi Raymond Harari credited the total communal aspect of the Flatbush education and the specific real-world responsibilities pressed onto every student in the high school years especially. Assistant principal and former head of college guidance Jill Sanders believes that emphasis creates a bigger impact on female students who quickly recognize and benefit from the knowledge that they're being asked to take on the same academic, communal, and social responsibilities as the boys. I also had to ask the only other person on Earth who attended both Flatbush and Norfolk Academy: my older sister Marianne. She believes the fact that most of the Flatbush students during the 1960-2000 period were immigrants or first generation Americans plays a huge role in their post-school career success. The drive to succeed just seems stronger with newcomers to this country no matter where they come from.
I think those are great answers, and they make more sense when you consider the geographical aspect to this story as well. Flatbush benefits from the fact that most of its alumni currently reside in either New York City or Israel. And New York is... well, you know the song that says, "if you can make it there you can make it anywhere." Silicon Valley is quickly gaining on New York and the Northeast in general on that score, but this is still the city that never sleeps. And Israel, for all its political challenges, has gone from a small agricultural settlement to an economic and technological powerhouse over the past 50+ years. Many Flatbush graduates who emigrated to Israel, (some classes boast up to 30-35% of their members who have done so), have benefited from that boom or participated directly in bringing it about. Now just think about that for a second. Is there any other ethnicity in America where young people could return to their traditional homelands and enjoy great economic success? I suppose it will be more likely to happen in the coming decades for American immigrants from China, India, and even Africa. But that certainly was not common or very possible from 1960-2000.
Of course, this entire discussion hinges on whether parents really do have a choice when it comes to their family's education. Too many children in America, especially minority children, are still trapped in ineffective public school systems in states where the political powers that be restrict access to charter schools and private school vouchers. We'll never know just how far all of our kids can go with a better education until that problem is solved.
And it's also important not to put too much emphasis on school at any level. No matter what the education level, children who have two loving and caring parents closely involved in their upbringing will always have a leg up on the kids who don't. We can all take heart in the fact that while we may not be able to get all our children into Harvard, we can give them something a lot more important and enduring.
But for those of us who do have that kind of upbringing and the luxury of school choice, I think a good recipe for a school that wants to produce successful alumni is becoming more clear. Rigorous college prep is great, but even better is a rigorous classroom curriculum combined with teaching young people that they must find a purpose greater than grades, financial gain, and themselves. And you can't get all of that from a school, not even in the Ivy League or a super prep school. The key to achieving the greatest financial and career success is making sure not to put so much emphasis on any one part of education and focus on molding the entire child as a productive and purposeful person instead.
That's easy, right?
Jake Novak is supervising producer of "Power Lunch."
From the CNBC website, April 27, 2015