In Praise of the Ben Gamla School

I am assuming that, by now, most readers have already heard about the Ben Gamla Charter School, a bilingual Hebrew-English charter school located here in South Florida.  I, along with others, believe that this model offers unique and tremendous potential for altering the character of American Jewish life.

I would like to mention several factors which make this the right model at the right time.

• It follows what everybody else is doing.  Despite the atypical debate swirling around it, the bilingual charter school concept is hardly unique; many other charter schools (in South Florida, as elsewhere) train students to be fluent in a foreign language as well as in English.  Indeed, bilingual charter schools specializing in French and Spanish opened in Broward County(where Ben Gamla is located) at the same time.  For various reasons, the current debate on bilingual charter schools seems to focus on Ben Gamla and the Khalil Gibran Academy, a bilingual English-Arabic charter school in New York City.  The controversy is ostensibly regarding the potential “religious nature” of these schools.  However, this argument is never made about bilingual charter schools that teach a European language (I guess this means that religious influence or bias has never been a problem in the history of places like Germany, France, or Spain).   
• It is a rational strategy in a globalized world.  Other English-based nations (like Australia, Great Britain, and Canada) already support cultural diversity in a greater way than the U.S. does.  Indeed, the United States seems to be one of the few modern industrialized societies where an educated person is not expected to know more than one language. 
• Hebrew study is a “real world” endeavor.  It is not only a ‘valid’ secular topic of study - it is the primary language of a functioning nation-state, thus could have more practical value than learning languages like Latin or Yiddish.  I point this out since many of the critics of a Hebrew language charter school (many of them Jewish) cannot seem to comprehend that Israel exists as something more than a ”spiritual center”.
• Bilingual education rejects the ‘melting pot’ yet supports pluralism.   The “melting pot” ideology implicitly tried to enforce a single ‘meta-culture’ across society.  While some critics accuse bilingual schools of risking potential balkanization of society, these schools actually expose others to new cultures in a non-threatening way.  Both Jewish and non-Jewish students are free to attend the Ben Gamla school.  Indeed, the school has already attracted a handful of African American students, as an article in the New York Times indicated.  In contrast, other public schools inculcate cultural norms that parents may not accept.  As one parent of a Ben Gamla student noted, “‘If I were to send (my daughter) to any other public school, you better believe that come December, she’d be learning Christmas carols”.
• Charter schools are distinctly unlike other alternatives, including private schools.  Any private school must justify its cost; this encourages Jewish private schools to market themselves as “elite institutions”, comparable with their secular counterparts.  This need for demonstrating academic quality can wind up pushing tuition fees higher.  Charter schools, by contrast, are certainly public schools, with all of their strengths and weaknesses.  Even if there are similarities in their curricula, I would doubt that the experience of attending a charter school would be identical to a private school experience.  For those parents (and there still are some!) who believe in public school education, this would be a positive difference.
• Significant financial resources must come from the public sector.  The cost to seriously promote the Hebrew language in the U.S. would probably be enormous.   As Peter Deutsch (a former U.S. congressman who is a founder of the Ben Gamla movement) noted in an article in Ha’Aretz, the anticipated government funding for four Ben Gamla schools over a decade (roughly $250 million) is equivalent to the amount that all of the major Jewish foundations would spend on educational projects throughout the same period.  Thus, the charter school option is probably the only way that Hebrew language instruction could have a serious impact in the United States.
• Even a few schools could have a discernible impact.  Note that the one Ben Gamla school in Florida currently enrolls around 400 students.  This number is actually greater than the entire number of New York City public high school students who studied Hebrew as a foreign language in 2004 (330 students in the six high schools that offered Hebrew courses), according to a New York Times article.
• My personal experience affirms this model.  I am a product of public school Hebrew education.  Like many other Jews of my generation, I was first exposed to Hebrew via Sunday School classes.  However, I began gaining real Hebrew fluency via four years of language instruction in my public high school.  At the time I attended, roughly half of the high school population was Jewish, yet the Hebrew language program was the smallest foreign language program and was contually threatened with partial or complete closure.  Unfortunately, American Jewish youth do not take advantage of resources like these, even when they are made available.  Nevertheless, my own experience (and that of many peers) demonstrates the validity of emphasizing modern Hebrew as a core component in Jewish education.