When School and Family Don’t Match

She comes from a Modern Orthodox family and attends a strict Bais Yaakov.  

He’s in a Chassidic yeshivah, though his family has been Sephardic for generations.  

She doesn’t want her classmates at a Modern Orthodox high school to know her family is Yeshivish.  

Their observance and hashkafot may differ widely, but these three students have something important in common: the experience of school misalignment. 

In the OU study of people who have left Orthodoxy, twenty-two out of the twenty-nine participants reported experiencing a “misalignment” between themselves or their families and the schools they attended. They described having to “constantly negotiate their religious identities,” performing for an audience of teachers and peers at school while adopting a different lifestyle at home. The feeling of hypocrisy this engendered—and “secondary consequences” such as bullying from peers—eventually became a factor in their decision to leave the community. 

Misalignment, as defined by the study, can manifest in many ways, says Dr. Moshe Krakowski, professor at the Azrieli Graduate School of Jewish Education and Administration at Yeshiva University and lead researcher in the study. “Even if your family is more religious than the school, there’s a sense of disruption. My family is saying I have to do this or that, but my school doesn’t require it. So does all of this really matter?” 

Misalignment can also be academic. Six of the study’s participants described being in a school that did not accommodate their learning styles, and Jewish educators say that kind of mismatch is pervasive—and damaging. [See the sidebar entitled “Making A Place for All Children.”] 

While schools may be tempted to blame parents (and parents, schools), the causes of misalignment are complex and varied. Many educators, therapists, parents and former students who have dealt with the issue describe misalignment as an unavoidable reality of life. “It’s nobody’s fault,” Dr. Krakowski says, noting that parents often don’t have access to schools that fit their family’s values exactly. “Kids have to go to school.”    

The negative consequences of misalignment, however, can often—with some foresight, perspective and planning—be avoided.  

Holding Kids to a Higher Standard 

Growing up in the early 1990s in New City, a small town north of Monsey, Jordan Soffer watched two of his siblings graduate from a Conservative day school and move on to a Modern Orthodox high school where all students were expected to be shomer Shabbat. Their family wasn’t Shabbat observant, but, Soffer recalls, his parents never considered that an issue.  

“I don’t think it crossed their minds,” says Soffer, now head of school at Striar Hebrew Academy in Sharon, Massachusetts. “At the time it was quite common for families to send to Orthodox schools while knowing that they were living very differently. Our next-door neighbors were doing the same thing.”   

Soffer’s parents and their contemporaries wanted their children to learn about their heritage. While they respected Jewish law, they didn’t feel the need to reinforce every lesson at home. This scenario still exists today: 11 percent of Jews who identify as non-Orthodox send their children to a yeshivah or day school, according to Pew’s 2013 report (this figure includes non-Orthodox day schools). Frustration with public schools during the Covid-19 pandemic, and, more recently, the Jewish awakening after October 7, have led more non-Orthodox parents to consider a day school education for their children.   

In a related phenomenon, parents who are becoming more observant may choose a school with more stringent religious standards in the hope that the family will “grow into it.”  

The inconsistency and the lack of partnership is really confusing for kids. They have to feel that their foundation is stable.

Alice came from a family that did not observe Shabbat and attended synagogue only a few times a year. But when her father began the process of becoming a ba’al teshuvah, he immediately moved her, a third grader at the time, into an Orthodox day school. “I came with background that was really a lot different than the other kids,” she says. “I remember being extremely self-conscious that I didn’t know a single prayer that my friends were singing out loud.” The move from a Conservative day school to an Orthodox one required a massive academic and social adjustment, one for which she was woefully unprepared. 

Like Alice, a large percentage of the OU study’s participants came from families where the parents had made “significant changes” to their religious practice, often becoming extremely observant very quickly.  

But misalignment between school and home is common in Orthodox families as well, says Erin Stiebel, director of NCSY’s GIVE summer program. Among the diverse crowd of Modern Orthodox teenage girls who join her to spend a summer volunteering in Israel, Stiebel has noticed change. “Our program gets girls now from schools to the right of the schools we used to get girls from. Everyone is sending to the right, and it keeps moving,” she says. “The parents put their children into a school that’s to the right of the family because they want to hold their children to a higher standard.”  

Even small differences in religious expectations—short sleeves versus three-quarter-length—can be destabilizing for her students, Stiebel notes. But witnessing their parents change their behavior depending on the circumstances is much more disturbing. She recalls a former student who came to her crying on the last day of the program because her parents were planning to take her on a cruise where it would be impossible to keep kosher or observe Shabbat: “She said, ‘It’s too confusing for me. I don’t want to go.’ Her parents put her into a black-and-white, boxed world, but what she saw at home was so different. And today she’s still confused.”   

“Relationships Are Probably the Biggest Thing” 

Some degree of misalignment may be inevitable, but parents should do everything they can to avoid it, says Yaakov Mintz, educational advocate at Work At It, an organization that provides support and career counseling for Jewish youth who have not found success in conventional educational settings. “Parents should prioritize having the school values aligned with the family values and with the child,” he says. That can sometimes mean weighing the needs of the child against hashkafic considerations. Mintz notes that families are often hesitant to choose “alternative” schools even when their children would benefit from them, because of the perceived stigma attached to that choice.  “All too often, people are more interested in schools as a status symbol. It’s a social symbol; it’s part of your identity,” he says. “Parents should think really hard about where they send their kids to school—not what that means for them socially, but what their individual child needs.” 

Once parents choose a school, communicating respect for the school’s values is key, Stiebel asserts. “I don’t think parents intend to give negative messaging, but sometimes they do. It’s as simple as a newsletter coming home and the parents scoffing about the way things are written,” she says. “The inconsistency and the lack of partnership is really confusing for kids. They have to feel that their foundation is stable.”      

That feeling of stability may come from a figure outside the family as well. Soffer, who is currently writing his EdD dissertation on non-Orthodox children attending Orthodox schools, points out that not all children react negatively to religious misalignment. “What’s fascinating to me is that people have radically different experiences. Some people experience it as a tension that needs to be resolved, and some people don’t even experience it as dissonance,” he says. “For them, it’s just two spaces with two sets of rules. Do I feel a tension between sitting in a library and sitting at a football game? In one place I’m quiet, and in the other place I’m loud. So am I a loud person or a quiet person? It’s just two separate scenarios.”  

While it’s difficult to predict how a child will react to misalignment, there are a few telling indicators. “In my experience, relationships are probably the biggest thing,” says Soffer. “Is there someone you can point to as having created space for this experience [of misalignment] to be okay? Usually that person is a teacher or a rabbi.”  

In fact, all the participants in the OU’s study reported that their relationships with rabbis and other religious authority figures were critical to their development and sense of identity, many citing it as the “single most important factor in their relationship to Orthodoxy.” Thus, it would seem that a caring, compassionate teacher or rebbi could help a child navigate the challenges of school misalignment, while a critical, punitive teacher or principal could have the opposite effect.  

A Fine Line for Schools 

On paper, the school Mrs. T. and her husband had selected for their daughter was perfectly aligned with their family’s values—a right-wing Yeshivish school in northern New Jersey. But when her daughter brought in a book to read at recess that was deemed inappropriate by the school administration, the family found itself in a struggle that escalated quickly.  

“They turned it into a discipline issue, and then she acted out more because of the way they were treating her,” Mrs. T. says. Soon her daughter was having trouble conforming to the school’s dress code. Mrs. T. describes the administration’s response as “bullying” and “shaming.” “There were times they would call me, and I would hear my daughter crying hysterically in the background,” she says. “It became very traumatic.”     

Religious schools must walk a fine line to maintain their desired level of observance, while promoting their students’ well-being. “Schools and communities should think carefully about how they communicate social and religious norms and expectations,” the OU study authors write, noting that in very liberal communities, young people tend to drift away from Orthodoxy because of a lack of clear boundaries. “A complete absence of these expectations may lead people to leave, but extremely rigid expectations, or intolerance of the violation of social norms, may also lead people to leave.” 

Parents should prioritize having the school values aligned with the family values and with the child. . . . All too often, people are more interested in schools as a status symbol. It’s a social symbol; it’s part of your identity. 

Many religious schools try to avoid misalignment struggles by implementing rigorous admission processes. But these, too, can backfire. “When I first moved to Monsey, I found there were school [administrators] that were visiting the homes before they even accepted the child to the school,” says Mindy Reifer, principal at the Adolph Schreiber Hebrew Academy in Rockland County. “The parents were presenting a front, saying to the children, ‘We have to pretend, so that you can go to this school.’”  

One might think that in large communities with many schooling options, the problem of misalignment would be alleviated. Ironically, however, schools in such communities may be so intent on differentiating themselves from the competition and upholding their own religious or academic standard that they are unwilling to risk admitting a child who has struggled in another school.  

More than a third of the OU study’s participants said they had switched schools over the course of their education, usually leaving mainstream schools for institutions that catered to at-risk youth. Few of them reported positive changes as a result of these moves. Unable to find a school that would accept her daughter, Mrs. T. eventually opted to send her to a non-Jewish program.  

“A place in the Jewish community for all our children” 

Short of completely reforming the school system, Mintz works with teachers in mainstream schools to help them make all their students feel welcome. “You can have students who are completely misaligned with the school, but if the school is aware and accepting of it, they can create a program that will keep them in the community,” he says.  

For academic misalignment, that might mean a less rigorous track that creates space for music instruction or woodworking; for students coming from different religious backgrounds, it might mean programming to help parents learn and assimilate the school’s religious standards. “Schools’ number one goal should be to make a place in the Jewish community for all our children,” Mintz says. “That should come before academic achievement or any other benchmarks that we set.”  

Community schools, which open their doors to all Jewish children in a particular locale, have misalignment built into their mission statements. Adolph Schreiber has carved out a place for itself in Monsey’s diverse and expanding community by taking on that role, with a student body that includes everything from right-wing Modern Orthodox to “ex-Chassidish” families where Shabbat observance isn’t a given. Reifer, principal of the boys’ division, notes that while the school never compromises on halachah, she sees diversity as a bonus rather than a threat.   

“Because it’s so diverse, people kind of accept that what every person does is good for them, and they’re not as quick to judge,” she says. “It works more globally. If you have some kids putting on a tallis, and some kids wearing a black hat, and some kids just putting on tefillin, and it’s all accepted and we’re all friends, I think it gives kids more flexibility to say, wait a minute, maybe there’s a place for me in the fold and I don’t have to look outside of it.” 

Every Child as an Individual 

The consequences of misalignment—a blanket term that covers a vast array of experiences—ultimately depend on the individual child who encounters it.   

Alice’s family eventually became fully observant, but Alice’s feeling of displacement persisted throughout her schooling. She spent her elementary school years struggling to fit in, and her high school years arguing with teachers and rabbis. “Educators are sort of biased in their mission. They want you to leave this institution holding a certain set of values. They didn’t see me as an individual with individual needs,” she says. After graduation, she opted not to attend seminary, and today no longer considers herself part of the community.  

For Soffer, misalignment took a different turn. His two elder siblings had been miserable in their Orthodox high school, so his mother sent him to a Conservative one. “It turned out not to be a good fit for me,” he says wryly. “By ninth grade I was already becoming more religious.” At one point, Soffer was threatened with expulsion for insisting on a traditional minyan rather than an egalitarian one, but support from a teacher he respected helped him through the experience.  

Now a head of school himself, Soffer said he handles misalignment on a case-by-case basis. “The moment we try to dictate norms, we have a problem,” he says. “We have to look at every child individually.” And as the parent of a teenager, he adds, “We can’t control children. The biggest blessing we can give children is loving them deeply, no matter how they’re expressing themselves.” 

S. Schreiber is a freelance writer.

In This Section

Leaving the Fold: The OU’s New Study Provides Insights Into Attrition 

Why Study Attrition? by Dr. Moshe Krakowski 

Parenting on Different Pages by Merri Ukraincik 

When School and Family Don’t Match by S. Schreiber 

The Role of the Rabbi

“It’s not all or nothing”