Tried Getting Your Kids Into a Lakewood School Recently?

When unbalanced markets cause spiraling social problems

I have it on excellent authority that finding a school in Lakewood that’s willing to accept your children can be stressful. (That noise you’re hearing in the background is the bitter laughter of my own Lakewood-based kids.)

The primary cause is obvious: the population of school-aged children is growing faster than the capacity of the local schools. Far faster.

Just how quickly is the population growing? As I recently noted, according to US Census data, in 2017 there were 14,329 children in Lakewood (08701) between the ages of five and nine. By 2021 there were 19,322. That’s a 35% increase in just four years.

Given the high demand for spaces - and considering how the private school “market” in the area is relatively lightly regulated and potentially profitable - why aren’t new schools opening up to fill the gaps?

Well new schools do open quite regularly, but there just aren’t enough of them. Perhaps that’s due to structural constraints like funding availability, zoning restrictions, and unattractive risk exposure considerations that are preventing further capacity growth. And given how most of their incoming spaces are already set aside for the younger siblings of existing students, established schools will have very few truly “open” spots each year.

But while the demographic imbalance is probably no one’s fault, it is causing significant social disruption that’s worth thinking about.

Just consider the consequences of intense competition for the available spaces. Let me explain what I mean. Everyone is under pressure:

• School administrators are being bombarded at all hours with desperate pleas from parents and the powerful individuals who agree to advocate for them. The pressure to overcrowd their classrooms must be overwhelming.

• Justified or not, the rumor-based reputations earned by schools spread quickly through the highly-connected parent population, motivating them to focus their efforts on only the highest-rated institutions.

• Young, idealistic couples planning the chinuch of their first-born children are particularly susceptible to the pressure to conform. (And they often still imagine that it’s possible to raise the “perfect” child.)

• Local politicians and committees endure unrelenting demands to loosen zoning, safety, and density rules to facilitate new schools - often leading to poor choices and community conflict.

Here’s where the pain really starts. For every young family with sufficient connections, pedigree, and money to succeed, there are others that fail. Even if, eventually, everyone manages to place their kids, many won’t end up where they wanted to be. And, more importantly, they’ve been exposed as powerless “outsiders”.

Even worse is the vulnerability they nearly all feel. It doesn’t take much to imagine the psychological and social costs that can hit families who answer “yes” to any of these questions:

• Does your child struggle with cognitive or behavioral problems?

• Does your child require more exercise and recreation time than your school offers?

• Do you want more (or less) secular instruction than your school offers?

• Does your preferred personal or professional lifestyle include internet and smartphone use?

• Are you stressed from the fear that missing tuition payments might jeopardize your child’s position?

As a “barely tolerated” customer who’s locked into a large and unresponsive factory-scale school community, you’re largely powerless to change your circumstances. And, as I’ve written elsewhere, enforcing social coercion can have halachic and moral consequences.

This isn’t to suggest that any specific choices made by school administrations are necessarily wrong, or that they’re necessarily happy with how impersonal and cold such huge class sizes can make them appear. But it does mean that the difficult circumstances no one asked for can lead to real and serious impacts.

Ultimately, when existing market supply can’t meet demand and there’s no way to sufficiently increase supply, costs (of one kind or another) will rise to the point where some consumers will “solve for the equilibrium” by giving up and moving away.

Perhaps those are the smart ones.