The south Brooklyn neighborhod of Mill Basin is a racially diverse mix, with immigrants from Asia, a number of Spanish-speaking countries and the former Soviet Union.

Backers of a new charter school specializing in Hebrew set to open there in the fall say all of those ethnic and religious groups will be attracted to the academic institution, not just Jews.
But while the school’s organizers say they will offer top-quality instruction without crossing church-state boundaries, critics say public schools should not celebrate one particular culture.

The Hebrew Language Academy Charter School’s school will open two years after the debut of a controversial Arabic-themed public school, also in Brooklyn, and as school districts around the nation grapple with issues of religion and culture.

The Hebrew school’s board chairwoman, Sara Berman, said her school “will be the finest example of what America is today.”

Berman said the school’s rigorous curriculum will attract students who reflect the student population of the area, which has a substantial number of Jews but is three-quarters black, Hispanic and Asian. She said Jewish and non-Jewish students alike will benefit from learning Hebrew.

“We really believe that learning a second language helps children in other ways besides the language itself,” she said, citing studies that suggest that language instruction stimulates brain development.

The state Board of Regents approved the Hebrew charter school on Jan. 13 with one dissenting vote.

Regent Saul Cohen, who cast the no vote, said in an e-mail that the student population of Community District 22, where the school will be situated, “is 74 percent minority. I doubt that many of the minorities would be interested in this school.”

One opponent of that view is Maureen Gonzalez-Campbell, a veteran educator who has been chosen as the principal of the Hebrew charter school.

“Any opportunity for your child to learn a second language, whether it’s Hebrew or any other language, is beneficial,” said Gonzalez-Campbell, who is African-American and speaks no Hebrew herself.

The Hebrew charter school, which does not have a site yet, is due to open with 150 students in kindergarten and first grade and will grow to 450 in grades K-5 by the fifth year.

Like other charter schools, it will be taxpayer-funded. But it expects to raise additional money from private donors and has commitments of $500,000 a year from philanthropist Michael Steinhardt and $250,000 a year from the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation.
Steinhardt, the father of Berman, the school’s chairwoman, founded the Steinhardt Foundation for Jewish Life in 1994 with the goal of revitalizing Jewish identity.

But Berman said the charter school will not promote the Jewish religion, instead using secular texts to teach modern Hebrew.

Berman, whose own children attend a Jewish day school in Manhattan, is a former parenting columnist for the New York Sun, a now-defunct daily that led the opposition to the Khalil Gibran International Academy, the Arabic-themed school.

That school opened in September 2007 after its first choice for a principal, Debbie Almontaser, was forced to resign over comments she had made about the word “intifada.” Critics said Almontaser should have condemned the use of the word, which commonly refers to the Palestinian uprising against Israel, on T-shirts made by a youth organization. Almontaser has sued to get the job back; the lawsuit is pending.

The school will not be the nation’s first Hebrew charter school.

The Ben Gamla Hebrew Charter School in Hollywood, Fla., prompted fierce debates when it opened in 2007. It serves kosher meals and its director is a rabbi, but an expert hired by the district deemed Ben Gamla’s lesson plans “entirely appropriate for a publicly funded charter school.”

The Brooklyn Hebrew school’s applicants satisfied the New York state regents that they will not violate the U.S. Constitution, but they have not silenced their critics.

Diane Ravitch, a professor of education at New York University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said in an op-ed piece in the Daily News that she objected to the Hebrew school for the same reasons she objected to the Khalil Gibran school two years ago, because a public school should not be “centered on the teaching of a single non-American culture.”
“We don’t send children to public schools to learn to be Chinese or Russian or Greek or Korean,” Ravitch said. “We send them to learn to be American.”

(Source: WABC-TV/DT)