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I’ve been trying to learn about the situation but I’ve noticed every website reports something a little different. If you know the Answer to the following question pls answer.
1: are these laws going to affect high schools or just elementary and middle
2: how many hours are required every day for differ levels of school( middle/high/elementary17.5 hours/week required.
Most Litvish yeshivos offer less than 10 hours a week. Darchei Torah, which wipes the floor compared to public schools, English hours are 2:30-5:15, with breaks, four days a week.
Even with the clarification from NYSED about 17.5 hours, almost every Yeshivish (non-Chasidish) Yeshiva is still way behind the newly clarified minimum number of hours. Even yeshivos like Darchei Torah, that does much better in standardized testing than the local public schools, has four 40 minute periods between 2:30-5:30, four days a week, totalling 10.67 hours a week.
Thus despite doing much better than public schools, these regulations would require the Yeshiva to add over 65% more hours than they currently offer. This for students who already have a very very long school day, on a six day school week.
Thereby forcing the Yeshivas to either eliminate almost 7 hours of Torah study every week or add to an already heavy schedule on young children.
That’s because there is no clear answer. The original guidelines were very vague and only gave a number of hours per week of some vaguely defined instruction. The people working on the issue are first and foremost trying to get a straight answer from the State of NY as to what exactly will be required. The six hours per day is a worst-case-scenario interpretation of the laws. But even a meikal interpretation will still be far more secular instruction than Yeshivas can handle or even need.
Actually the new regs will not force anybody to do anything. They simply say that if the schools do not provide a certain number of hours of secular studies they will not receive state money for textbooks (why bother if they are not using them?), transportation, etc. The yeshivot can elect to pass on the money and either raise tuitions, look for private donors or look for community support or any combination of the above,
Avi, wrong. They are threatening to declare parents to be truants and impose criminal penalties for truancy. Even if the school doesn’t take a dime.
He’s also wrong about the textbooks. The yeshivos use textbooks, just not for the number of hours required by the new regulations.
Hours of instruction have never been shown to be highly correlated with higher performance on achievement tests. That being said, it defies logic that for some of the yeshivos offering barely an hour or two of instruction in secular subjects shouldn’t increase the time and quality of instruction but the NYS Ed threats against schools and parents is politically a non-starter and way overdone.
Darchei Torah offers 2 and half hours, four days a week, of secular studies. And their students achieve among the highest Regents exam marks in NYS.
Yet according to the NYSED, Darchei Torah students are truants. Since they don’t have 17.5 hours a week.
Children should study less and exercise more. You can’t just sit a kid down at a desk and cram information into his brain. The brain needs time to process data.
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