New NY Rules Provide Roadmap for Regulating Hasidic Private Schools

The New York State Board of Trustees on Tuesday voted for the first time to require private schools to prove they are teaching English, math and other basic subjects or risk losing government funding.

The passage of new rules by the board, which oversees the state’s department of education, could be a watershed moment for Hasidic Jewish religious schools that have for years been essentially free to offer as little as possible. or without secular instruction while still collecting wages.

State education officials have been considering the measure for years, and the vote came a few days later The New York Times reported that more than 100 boys’ schools run by the Hasidic Jewish community have garnered $1 billion in public funding in recent years but deprived generations of students of basic education. Sexist schools, which enroll more than 50,000 boys across Brooklyn and lower in the Hudson Valley, also regularly enforce corporal punishment, The Times reported. The report caused an outcry from New York’s top officialswith many people point out the new state regulations as a first step.

The rules issued Tuesday are at least the third set of regulations to be drawn up by the council since 2018, as state officials set out to clarify how to enforce a long-standing law that requires Private schools provide an education equivalent to that in public schools. . The process began after the state received complaints about Hasidic schools, known as yeshivas, with former students and parents saying the schools did not provide a basic secular education.

“It is unconscionable to think that there are young people in schools who are not receiving a quality education,” Council Regents Chancellor Lester Young said, adding that the state “means business” in keeping private schools to academic standards.

But whether the rules have an impact will depend on enforcement, and it will largely be up to local school districts to enforce the guidelines – leaving open the possibility they could be ineffectively applied. or uneven.

Unlike previous versions of the rules, the regulations passed Tuesday do not impose minimum requirements on the amount of teaching time in secular subjects. And they don’t give clear deadlines for schools that don’t provide basic education to comply with the education requirements.

Instead, they allow schools to operate without penalty as long as education officials believe the school is making an improvement effort in good faith. State officials have not yet determined what such an effort would look like.

During a briefing with reporters last week, senior state education officials repeatedly dodged questions about what would happen to a school found to be non-compliant.

While it’s possible that schools could lose financial resources, officials also say that local school districts, rather than individual institutions, could face financial penalties. And officials did not say if any schools could be closed for breaking the law.

However, advocates of more secular education in Hasidic schools welcomed the vote.

“Today, the New York State Department of Education and its Board of Trustees took a huge step forward in ensuring that all children,” said Naftuli Moster, a yeshiva graduate student and founder of the Young group. attending non-public schools are entitled to the education they are entitled to. Advocates for Equal Education.

Moster and others have been pressing the issue for a decade, but city and state officials have avoided action, in part because of the influence of Hasidic community leaders. Those leaders pushed their followers to vote as a bloc and made protecting schools their top political priority.

Members of the Hasidic community, an intensely religious group that has struggled to separate itself from the outside world, voiced fierce protests in the months before Tuesday’s board meeting, prompting the State officials were flooded with hundreds of thousands of letters of protest. The day before the vote, opponents of the rules protested outside the Houses of Parliament, carrying signs that said, “We would rather go to jail than change the way our children are educated.” .”

“The state’s confirmation that it intends to regulate curricula and teachers at private schools and parishes is deeply disappointing and we oppose it,” Parents for Educational Freedom education and religion in schools, a group of Hasidic leaders and supporters of schools, said in the report. “New York parents have chosen a yeshiva education for over 120 years and they are proud of the successful results.”

Members of the Hasidic community aren’t the only ones unhappy with the new rules. Nathaniel Styer, a spokesman for the New York City school system, said it would give city Education Department officials additional enforcement duties, forcing them to inspect private schools while carrying the burden of take responsibility for public schools.

“We believe these regulations place an undue burden on our public school system,” said Mr. Styer, adding that the department will implement the regulations.

A city investigation into education in dozens of Hasidic yeshivas in Brooklyn has spanned seven years and two mayoral regulators and is still incomplete, though Mayor Eric Adams said through a spokesman. last week that the investigation was in its final stages. Several city officials tasked with visiting yeshivas said they had no training in school inspection and received little guidance from the state on how to do it.

Under the rules passed Tuesday, schools can choose from a list of options to demonstrate that they are complying with the law. They can show progress on state standardized tests – although The Times found that Hasidic boys’ schools have some of the lowest test scores in the entire state.

Schools can also demonstrate compliance by getting accreditation from an approved external organization, an avenue that has raised concerns among some activists, who fear that Hasidic communities can establish their own accreditation bodies.

Schools that cannot demonstrate compliance with the law must allow local school district officials to visit them by the summer of 2025, and officials will determine whether schools provide the required minimum education. are not.

The rules have come a long way to being enacted. State education officials first published a proposal four years ago, but in 2019 a judge made it because of a procedural issue; in 2020, the state withdrew another plan following criticism from Hasidic leaders.

Earlier this year, the state introduced another proposal with fewer requirements for schools, and more complicated consequences for circumvention. Hasidic leaders still organize a massive protest campaign, which has resulted in the state receiving nearly 350,000 comments about the regulations, most of them negative.

While the rules won’t greatly affect New York’s hundreds of independent and non-Hasidic religious schools, including many Jewish schools that offer strong secular curriculum, some private schools prefer The state’s elite joined the effort to stop the regulation.

Hasidic leaders have warned for years that any government intervention in the yeshivas could lead to a threat to the community, and many have called on their followers to help stop them. block regulations.

“This is an edict of real destruction to our future generations and we are obliged to make every effort to revoke it,” a letter in Yiddish was sent home to the family. families through yeshivas and promised that children who brought at least two unsigned Complaints would be entered into a “wine prize” draw.

“We don’t want people who don’t appreciate our value system to come and go,” says Aaron Twerski, a professor at Brooklyn Law School and a yeshiva graduate whose children also attend Hasidic yeshivas. tell us how to educate our children. Asked if he was concerned about the lack of secular education in many Hasidic schools, Mr Twerski replied: “We trade off, not the state.”

Despite the opposition, the Regency Committee made several changes to its proposal before formally adopting it on Tuesday, a move some elected officials hailed for its lack of education. education in Hasidic schools was reported by The Times.

“As legislator, taxpayer and Jew, I am appalled that we continue to allow this out-of-control system to expand and do so with hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer dollars. people,” said State Senator Liz Krueger, a Manhattan Democrat who chairs the Finance Committee. “State Department of Education regulations, to be passed today, must be enforced quickly.”

Jay Root contribution report.