Reply To: Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah Fighting NY Department of Education

frumtd: In addition to DaasYochid’s excellent points, and aside from ignoring your continual ad hominems attempting to make your post sound sophisticated despite its logical fallacies, I’ll address some of your erroneous points.

Impoverished families generally get social programs.

Impoverishment is determined by the Federal Poverty Level (FPL) set each year by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). This table is based on family size. In New York the law uses 200% of the FPL to determine eligibility for SNAP and various other social safety net programs. So a Jewish family of two parents and seven children in New York earning $93,000 will qualify for income based entitlement programs, as they are considered impoverished despite their $93,000 annual income. Whereas a goy living with his wife, child and dog earning $42,000 a year will be considered to be middle class, per the FPL guidelines, as his family income is over 200% of 2018’s FPL. Capish, dear frumtd? The goy who graduated from NYC’s esteemed P.S. 74 is considered middle class, apparently due to his terrific NYC public school education, whereas our local heimishe yid who graduated from Bobov (see my previous post as to where Bobov stands in the totem pole compared to local public schools) and earns $93,000 is “impoverished”.

And frumtd is telling us the above public school kid is doing better than the kid from Bobov, so we must now force Bobov to be “equivalent” in education to the public school.

It is the child’s life after all that is at stake here.

And it is the parents who are best suited and able to determine what is best for their child’s life rather than Big Brother or Uncle Sam.

The rules will apply to all private schools, but if a school performs well, most likely there will be no significant changes required.

This is a falsehood. The new regulations propagated several weeks ago by the NYS DOE make very clear that all private schools are subjected to their full guidelines, including requiring seven hours a day of secular studies, alone. Whether the private school is Ramaz, Yeshiva of Flatbush, Satmar, or Torah Vodaas.

If the State can clarify the rules/standards so that the Yeshivas that provide an adequate education feel comfortable that they are not affected by this, then you would see very quickly that Satmar and few others would be out there on their own. The position of those that do not provide an adequate secular education is not something that a lot of the Rabbonim expressing concern here, actually support.

Another untruth demonstrating you haven’t been paying attention to the issue in recent day. Just this very week Rav Yisroel Reisman, Rosh Yeshiva of Torah Vodaas (yeah, the one mentioned in my above comment, where the students whipped the public school students in their overachieving Regents exams scores) said in a video statement that the Chasidish, Litvish (like him) and modern Orthodox need to unite to fight the Department of Education on these regulations. Rav Brudny , Rosh Yeshiva in the Mir Yeshiva (hint: Not Chasidish), said the very same the day before.