For decades Orthodox Jewish parents who paid thousands of dollars every year for each of their children’s tuition, were told by their elected officials that the wall between state and church prevents government from assisting them.
However, the guidelines released yesterday by the NYS Education Department bulldozed that wall into oblivion. It directs all Yeshivos about what they must teach and how long each day they must teach it, and even empowers local bureaucrats to have an opinion on who does the teaching.
If that’s the case, Orthodox parents in the state have every right to demand that the government should pick up the multi-billion tab for their children’s education.
The guidelines released yesterday require mandatory inspections of every yeshiva in the state, with rigid requirement for the subjects our yeshivas must teach. All schools will have to provide curriculum and lesson plans to their districts and to explain how they hire, train and evaluate their teachers. But the State Education Commissioner announced at her press conference, that while these requirements are mandatory, yeshivas will not be provided with any mandated services reimbursement for fulfilling them.
The SED guidelines all make it clear that yeshivas that fail to meet these standards will be given one opportunity to come into compliance before being forced to shut down.
Let’s compare that to the City’s public schools. After all ,the Commissioner says that her authority stems from a law requiring parents to provide their children with a “substantially equivalent” education – equivalent, that is, to the public schools.
So let’s see how the City’s public schools are performing, since the State demands that we become equivalent to them.
In NYC School District 14, where Williamsburg Yeshivos are located, the proficiency rate for public school 8th graders from homes where English is not the home language (like many chassidishe children) is in the very low single digits! That’s right, only 1 or 2 percent of those public school students (which the DOE refers to as ELLs) are proficient in English or Math. The 6th graders are no more proficient. In fact, their proficiency rate in English was 0%. That’s right, that isn’t a typo. Not one 6th grade student from a non-English speaking home was proficient in English.
And even among students from English speaking homes in the district, only a minority of them received scores of proficient in Math and English. District 20, which encompasses Boro Park, doesn’t fare much better.
What are the State and City doing about those students and schools?
Here are the most recent year’s test scores that the City provided to the State:
Where are the State guidelines mandating inspections of these schools! What are the consequences of their failures! When do their parents receive a warning letter, and directed to switch their children to another school or face truancy proceedings.
If yeshivas are going to be the most regulated schools in the state, they should at least be entitled funding to meet their regulated requirements.
According to census data, the cost of educating a child in New York City public schools is $24,109 per student. There are 166,257 yeshiva students in New York State.
That means that yeshiva parents, who pay the same real estate and other taxes as every other family to fund the public schools, save the state $4,088,290,013 every year.
Governor Cuomo, check your mailbox for the bill.
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28 Responses
The government likes spending tax money.
I’m a little baffled by this whole brouhaha. I went to Yeshivah. I had a morning of rigorous limudei kodesh, followed by (maybe not as rigorous, but definitely required brain power and work) limudei chol. Most of my class wound up learning full time after HS, I and a few others chose to go to college. It’s not hard to do both studies. Hundreds and hundreds of my fellow students in the litvishe Yeshivahs did it, and continue to do it day in and day out. And the vast vast VAST majority continue to learn on a daily basis AND have an education based career that is able to support our families and give a little back to the yeshivahs that guided us. This is making a mountain out of a molehill. And the rhetoric that it’s an “assault” makes us sound laughable. I had ehrlich yiddin as teachers for almost every subject, they edited what needed editing and customized our secular experience. And we ended up just fine. Had this been the case in these few chassidish yeshivahs for the last 20 years, we probably would find ourselves in this situation.
Edit: “wouldn’t find ourselves in this situation”
call their Bluff send all the children to public schools for a day or two and see how they handle it.
Those in NY choosing to send their children to yeshivos have no right to demand anything. You made a choice, now you live with it. Better you should demand that the yeshivos begin to teach the students in a way that will allow them to work for a living when they become adults.
Finally we yiden will come to our senses, albeit ‘forced’ on us thru the govornment, and teach our children the basic tools to get ahead in life!!! What a positive development!!!
I don’t understand… does this mean that if the government provides the same funds they do to everyone else then its ok to sacrifice the Jewish education in favor of LGBTQRS issues ??
to be honest it doesn’t bother me to learn that yeshivas need their students on same proficiency level as public schools. Is that so difficult or wrong?
While I feel very strongly that every kid needs to have at least a basic secular education, at the same time how can the government justify taking millions of tax dollars from our community and using it for their school system which they know we have minimal benefit from then hit us with regulations that will cost us money. Again even though I feel these regulations will benefit our children the costs should allow us to get some of our tax dollars back, not to us but to our schools.
All yeshiva parents should join a lawsuit to sue New York State for this attack on our First Amendment rights (see Yoder v Wisconsin). We should also sue for the funding of the secular programs at yeshivas in its entirety. This should be taken up to the Supreme Court where the conservative majority may support our cause (and overturn some precedent rulings that prevent funding for religious schools).
There is a painful reality here. Our students, by attending private schools, are actually not saving the government a dime. That’s correct. Not a dime. Oh, the numbers from the education budget? That is true. But we are graduating students from elementary and high schools who are without skills, and end up as dependent on entitlement programs. Yes, Medicaid, Section 8, Food Stamps, etc. Let’s include many who get work study money for questionable “study”. I’m not here to criticize. Just recognize that we, as a community, are failing to provide proper education to enable our children to enter the working world and survive without long term dependency.
I have heard all the rationalizations – reasons given after the conclusion has already been made. Better we should get it than goyim. NO. We are not supposed to be dependent. We are supposed to be self-sufficient. No, not everyone is cut out for lifetime “full time” learning. Let’s be honest. If you want to take government money, you are stuck taking it on their terms. And they do not want our children as lifelong drains on the system.
Again – reality. We are capable of offering a very adequate education to our children על טהרת הקודש. We should be able to master and prove to the State that our talmidim can be fully proficient in all the subjects. Just providing a curriculum won’t suffice, and the state knows that. They will check. They will use test scores from standardized tests, not grades submitted from teacher to principal. We do not need to hide behind a costume of קדושה to continue to press our children to sponge off the system. We might get creative in how we deliver the education. The Chasam Sofer was expert in mathematics. And many other of our great gedolim were quite proficient in many areas that we label as secular. Math is not secular. Teach it. One might prefer that the spoken language at home is not English. But in the outside world, one needs to be able to maintain conversation. Our tzaddikim of yesteryear spoke Polish, German, Hungarian, etc. proficiently. Why do we think we are holier?
There are many nisyonos today. W trapped ourselves into this. Now, get creative, and figure out how we extricate ourselves from this web. We are not being asked to include treif subjects. Just normal ones. Maybe the numbers they applied are unfair. But the fundamental requirement is reasonable, and we are asleep at the switch.
No, I have nothing to with YAFFED, whose tactics are bullyish and nasty. Nor with PEARLS, that I feel are not handling this issue properly. Just a personal opinion.
the cost of educating a child in New York City public schools is $24,109 per student. Just a bit less than 1/2 the cost of each prisoner per year.
To ctrl alt del and others
How can a Jewish school teach at least 6 hours of English?
The little i know, I’m sorry to say that you don’t know that much when it comes to public school education. The average public school student in NY, many of them who barely make it through high school, and in many, many places throughout the USA as well, get low paying jobs and are dependent on government programs for life.
The US government is paying for public school students exhorbitant tuition and are getting returns for only a fraction of the money poured into public schools and colleges.
There are thousands of fine and successful businessmen in the chassidishe and litvishe community without 6 hours daily chol teaching. Basic english and math does not require most of the school day.
Learning Gemoroh gives us many skills and wisdom that no secular subject can offer.
If you think that’s the end of the story, just look at the other side of the Atlantic in the UK and even in E”Y where they insist on treife subjects as well. Once they start interfering with our chinuch it means – DANGER!
They have taken the role of Antiochus so we must take on the role of the Chashmonoim!
You get what you vote for. STOP VOTING IN DEMOCRATS!!!!
1. I like the idea of registering all – all – yeshiva students for public schools. The sudden overload will force government officials to to compromise and consider ways to provide financial support for yeshiva students.
2. For a number of years I have thought that frum Jews should consider sending their children to public schools for the secular portions of their education. There is a long tradition of “early release” for religious education, i.e., children are allowed to leave early on certain school days to get religious education. The long-term solution requires some clever political action – like flooding the public schools with frum yidden – to get relief for yeshiva tuition payers.
So because goiyeshe public school students who come from homes where English is not the primary language are not getting a good education, kal v’chomer, we should also assure that yiddeshe students leave school at least as dysfunctional and lacking of basic language and mathematical skills. We should reject any NYS requirement to at least offer the yeshiva and BY kids some opportunity to obtain basic educational skills so that they graduate as ignorant as their parents. Rather than fighting for the freedom to fail, embrace some reasonable requirements and work through Agudah and other mosdos to secure funding to assist in locating and hiring the need instructors for limudei chol.
The problem with flooding the public schools is that when push comes to shove we won’t do it as we don’t want to expose our kids to the schmutz of the public school system especially in the older grades
I’m curious to know if these guidelines apply to Muslim and Christian private schools.
Coffee Addict, it wasnt easy. But we did it. My day started at 6:45am for shacharis. We completed limudei kodesh by about 1. After lunch and minchah, we had secular classes till around 7. That was for HS. Elementary, was easier as the requirements (for both kodesh and chol were lighter. Dont get me wrong, it was a lot of hard work and a very long day, but it is doable. Thousands of my cohort are proof.
The author seems to be arguing “We’re just as good as the worst public schools.”
Don’t celebrate failing.
Its ridiculous to request their funds!!! You want to add more mandatory things like evolution and learn about things we will tear kriah later? No. We dont want their money.
Philosopher:
I happen to have worked in the public school system for years, and I do understand quite a bit of it. You make reference to many students who never really make it in high school and grow up to be dependent on the state. Yes, quite true. But many do make it, and their public school programs offer them the opportunity to accomplish that. Our yeshivos do not do that. The good students also emerge relatively handicapped. No system will make everyone succeed, though this should be a goal. But if a student who progresses with the completion of a curriculum can still do no math or figure out how to decipher a gas bill, we have a problem.
“To ctrl alt del and others
How can a Jewish school teach at least 6 hours of English?”
Count recess as PE, count Limudei Kodesh as foreign language, count time the little kids spend on Torah project-things as art, then it should be possible to get it down to only 4 hours of actual math, English, science, and history. That’s 1 hour each, which sounds perfectly reasonable to me.
To make one thing clear, don’t associate me with the wrong crowd. I do believe the state should fund the time we spend fulfilling their requirements. My only point is that the 6 hour thing is kind of click-bait. Even in the public schools, that includes probably 2 hours of non-academics.
And, one more thing. This “we should put all of our kids in public school, that’ll show ’em!” is absolute nonsense. That’s like saying “we should do exactly what the Greeks say and worship avodah zarah! Then they’ll see!”
Liberals in general are very pro-public school, often anti-private school. Having everyone in public schools is exactly what they want.
The little I know, I’m not saying that chedarim should not teach a minimum of math and English language, and I think it’s very important to have English language continued to be taught in Yeshiva.
However the public schools are definitely not models of good educational institutions with all kinds of perverted ideas being taught nowadays and between sports, lunch, recess and coming home early, together with irrelevant subjects that have no continued relevence in later life ( besides for filling their mind with garbage) they come out with very little actual knowledge. Many public school students graduate but a large percentage don’t and contrast that to Jewish girls schools where 99.9% of the students graduates and have superior knowledge of secular subject compared to public school students.
And EVERY single yeshiva student can go on to continued education regardless of the secular knowledge. However, I do agree that it is crippling not to know the basics in the English language. Despite all that, many Chassidishe men have successful careers and businesses while a very large percentage of public school students end up as cashiers in grocery stores. There is nothing wrong with being a cashier in a grocery store, but it’s ridiculous to pump in so much money and effort into the supposed “education” of public school students when a large percentage of them end up in low-paying jobs and for those who want to move on to a profession can do that at with the minimul education, which is what they they are already getting in public school, at a quarter of the expense that the government pays per public school student today.
It is not the average Yeshiva graduate who can’t decipher a gas bill, even the Yiddishe speaking ones. But a person who attended public school , well I wouldn’t be surprised if many of them can’t decipher gas bills…
momma, yes they do RCC schools, 7th Day Adventists, Episcopal Church schools and full time Muslim schools. Integrated curriculum isn’t a big secret.