PBL is not about student desires: it involves a project created by a teacher. A student may or may not be interested in the subject matter of that course. The philosophy behind project based learning has to do with student learning, not interest, and educators spend a lot of time evaluating the best practices to promote student learning. Some students hate projects and prefer tests, by the way, as a project may and often does require more active participation on the part of the student. The deception in the new proposal for the schools was in the suggestion that all of our existing yeshiva high schools are places with lecturing teachers, desks in rows, and a uniform philosophy of teaching. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course.

Not true. When Noam opened, it was responding to a real need for a new school. Moriah was turning people away and Yavneh was close to having no more room. Parents had to enroll their kids in pre-K in order to secure a spot. Ben Porat opened subsequently, originally to provide a Sephardi option but later morphing into a more mainstream school. There was no need for HeAtid to open at a time when the schools ought to have been consolidating. You are misrepresenting the history here.

Many commenters here (as well as Distenfeld and Kiderman) need a reality check: my students are going to Israel for one or two years of Torah study in droves. They happily participate in NCSY, Bnei Akiva camps, and all sorts of other activities both during and beyond high school. Sure, some go "off the derech," a phrase I really hate, but even those students will always be connected to Judaism via the strong social networks they formed in high school, and this to me is the most important factor in day school education. The critique of our current schools as failing to impart a love of Yiddishkeit is just not accurate. But the more things are repeated, the more they become mythology, regardless of the facts. If educators such as Rabbi Kraus and others are reacting strongly to this new proposal, it's precisely because it distorts the facts in a manipulative way.

But you don't think that GD was disrespectful to the entire network of yeshiva high schools in the Tri-state area? There was no disrespect in Rabbi Krauss's letter--there were serious questions that need to be answered when someone is calling for an "overhaul" of education as we know it. Why don't you compare the tuition at SAR to comparably excellent schools in our area? SAR offers one of the most academically excellent educations of any yeshiva day school. It costs a lot of money to provide a quality education. To get the best teachers, you have to pay them. You want to start a cheaper school? Fine. Just don't do so by falsely claiming that the existing schools are failing and that you can offer an educationally superior product.

I also have to say that the fiction perpetuated on this blog that administrators (and teachers) simply go on vacation from mid June to September is ludicrous. Enough already.

I disagree that competition is always a good thing. What unnecessary competition for students does to schools is to force them to spend time and money on PR and recruitment rather than on educational expenses such as professional development, course development, and other things a school should be doing. A new high school, which will require fundraising for all kinds of start up costs and costs in general, will divert already strained community funds from the existing high schools, causing more problems for people already struggling to pay tuition. The connection between the education reform mission of this new venture and affordability is quite murky here, so all this is doing is creating unneeded disruption at a time when the local schools need all the community support they can get. Local schools that, I should add, are doing a pretty good job of educating their students both secularly and Judaically.

I can vouch for Daniel's summer work, as I sat with him working on PBL units at a conference last week. That conference was made up of many teachers at the local "failing" schools, voluntarily spending three days to work on enhancing our classrooms with new ways of engaging our students. The week before that, I sat with 6 of my own colleagues from my particular "failing" yeshiva high school learning how to integrate iPads into our 9th grade classrooms. For the rest of the summer, I will re-read the five novels I will be teaching in September and creating new and revamping existing lessons for my students. If something doesn't work in my classroom, I change it, as do the majority of my colleagues both in my own school and in our neighboring schools. Bottom line: our schools are not failing, and actually, are producing some pretty amazing graduates doing some pretty amazing things. And I am privileged to work with so many excellent educators, both within my school and within the larger community. Very few of us want to see what we have created and are committed to improve be threatened by this venture. And here's an irony for you, Daniel Rosen: this initiative is all about the tactics of the corporate world--disruption, competition, hostile tactics, but claims to want to promote the 21st century skill of collaboration.