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+--- Thread: NY Hasidic group demands right to only religious education (/showthread.php?tid=270624)
NY Hasidic group demands right to only religious education - cbelt3 - 09-13-2022
Re: NY Hasidic group demands right to only religious education - SteveG - 09-13-2022
They want to live completely enclosed in a 17th century Middle European Shtetl.
BTW, all Ultra Orthodox are not behind this. You can attend a yeshiva with all the regular classes in addition to the Talmud/Torah study. There are different sects with different leaders.
Now that I've said that, I think those fighting the full curriculums are idiots.
Re: NY Hasidic group demands right to only religious education - Ombligo - 09-13-2022
Is there a link to further information about the situation?
Re: NY Hasidic group demands right to only religious education - hal - 09-13-2022
While youre searching for that link, I saw another story the other day that it appears that corruption in the city gov't allowed these schools to continue even though the kids were not learning enough to pass remedial testing. The Hasidic voting block is quite powerful (in NYC).
nah.. I can't do that without a link...
In Hasidic Enclaves, Failing Private Schools Flush With Public Money
The Hasidic Jewish community has long operated one of New York’s largest private schools on its own terms, resisting any outside scrutiny of how its students are faring.
But in 2019, the school, the Central United Talmudical Academy, agreed to give state standardized tests in reading and math to more than 1,000 students.
Every one of them failed.
Students at nearly a dozen other schools run by the Hasidic community recorded similarly dismal outcomes that year, a pattern that under ordinary circumstances would signal an education system in crisis. But where other schools might be struggling because of underfunding or mismanagement, these schools are different. They are failing by design.
The leaders of New York’s Hasidic community have built scores of private schools to educate children in Jewish law, prayer and tradition — and to wall them off from the secular world. Offering little English and math, and virtually no science or history, they drill students relentlessly, sometimes brutally, during hours of religious lessons conducted in Yiddish.
The result, a New York Times investigation has found, is that generations of children have been systematically denied a basic education, trapping many of them in a cycle of joblessness and dependency.
Segregated by gender, the Hasidic system fails most starkly in its more than 100 schools for boys. Spread across Brooklyn and the lower Hudson Valley, the schools turn out thousands of students each year who are unprepared to navigate the outside world, helping to push poverty rates in Hasidic neighborhoods to some of the highest in New York.
The schools appear to be operating in violation of state laws that guarantee children an adequate education. Even so, The Times found, the Hasidic boys’ schools have found ways of tapping into enormous sums of government money, collecting more than $1 billion in the past four years alone.
Re: NY Hasidic group demands right to only religious education - SteveG - 09-13-2022
try this==> https://nypost.com/2022/09/13/ny-state-education-board-approves-new-nonpublic-school-oversight-rules/
Re: NY Hasidic group demands right to only religious education - deckeda - 09-13-2022
They're being asked to be accountable to NY public school standards, given the tax breaks and other approvals to offer their alternative schooling.
They're fighting the dream of Christian schools everywhere, basically.
Re: NY Hasidic group demands right to only religious education - Janit - 09-13-2022
Steve G. wrote:
They want to live completely enclosed in a 17th century Middle European Shtetl.
BTW, all Ultra Orthodox are not behind this. You can attend a yeshiva with all the regular classes in addition to the Talmud/Torah study. There are different sects with different leaders.
Now that I've said that, I think those fighting the full curriculums are idiots.
Do you know which particular groups do this? The popular press tends to use the term Hasidim to mean all Hasidim, as well as all Haredim.
Re: NY Hasidic group demands right to only religious education - SteveG - 09-13-2022
here's a piece from the NY Daily News
For a decade, woefully underprepared graduates of ultra-Orthodox yeshivas have pleaded for New York City and State officials to require that these schools also provide their students the basics of a secular education. And for a decade, those pleas have been answered with cowardly buckling to a powerful political constituency telling officials to butt out.
With the final passage by the Board of Regents of new state regulations today, officials will get another chance. They must demand reform. Failing that, there must be severe consequences.
State law has long required the instruction a child receives to be “substantially equivalent to the instruction given to minors of like age and attainments at the public schools of the city or district where the minor resides.” This doesn’t mean Christian, Jewish, Muslim or secular classes must parrot those in the public schools, but that, in their own way, they must impart the basics in English, math, science and social studies. Anything less is educational neglect.
Substantially equivalent means everyone. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images/Getty Images)
But neglect has been the norm for tens of thousands of Hasidic youngsters in Brooklyn and Rockland and Orange counties. With notable exceptions, students graduate without the skills and knowledge necessary to make them employable. In 2019, when a timid, long-delayed New York City investigation finally came out, it found that just two of 28 inspected yeshivas met the bar.
New state rules give non-public schools multiple ways to prove they are fulfilling their legal obligations. Among others, they can be approved by an accepted educational accreditor; participate in the International Baccalaureate program; or regularly administer state-approved tests to their students. Otherwise, they invite a review by local officials — potentially triggering a remedial action plan and ultimately being deemed in defiance of state law.
It will soon fall to local officials, including Eric Adams — who as a candidate pooh-poohed criticism of the schools — to have the fortitude to inspect classrooms with the same seriousness health inspectors bring to doling out restaurant grades. Schools that fail children must shape up or be shut down.
Re: NY Hasidic group demands right to only religious education - SteveG - 09-13-2022
on the other hand....
Opinion
Hasidic families deserve a choice
By Eli Federman
New York Daily News
•
Sep 13, 2022
The New York State Board of Regents is passing new rules meant to enforce the state’s “substantial equivalency” law, so that yeshivas must offer more robust coursework in subjects like math, English and science. For years media outlets have been spotlighting deficiencies in standardized testing results in yeshivas.
But many Hasidic Jewish people don’t have the same value system which defines success as climbing the socioeconomic corporate ladder and becoming a doctor or lawyer with a good salary. They value studying ancient texts in Aramaic and biblical Hebrew, learning Jewish philosophy, history, ethics and Talmudic exegesis. The law should respect them and give them the freedom to raise their children as they see fit.
Even if the data is correct that the yeshiva students are faring poorly on standardized tests and white-collar jobs are the exception, so what? Do all Jewish people need to excel as doctors, lawyers, accountants and other professions that the secular world respects? Western democracies should give wide latitude to those seeking alternative lifestyles so long as people have basic health and safety standards met.
Hasidic people, who often get jobs as teachers in yeshivas and kosher supervisors, typically live modest lives. Those jobs don’t require English and math proficiency since they are within the Hasidic communities. Many also work blue-collar jobs like packing grocery shelves, delivering food, working in Amazon merchant warehouses, and the like.
Those members that become financially successful through real estate, e-commerce or other industries, give back to the community and help support other members that dedicate their lives to spending time in the study halls. They also have free-loan societies, and numerous charitable organizations that help those struggling in their communities.
It’s absolutely heartbreaking how Hasidic Jews that leave the community are left at a grave disadvantage due to inadequate literacy skills and secular knowledge.
But this is a challenge when anyone, including immigrants, or even secular Jews becoming Hasidic have to integrate into a new society and culture. There are great organizations such as Footsteps that help those who have left Hasidic communities integrate into broader society.
My father and mother sent me to a Hebrew school that had secular studies. My father later homeschooled me because he didn’t approve of either the public education system or the Jewish private schools. So I value secular education and alternative educational systems. I ultimately graduated from college and law school. My wife has a doctorate in nursing. My kids go to a Jewish school that has a high standard of English and secular education. That is what I chose for my family.
But we shouldn’t impose our worldview on the insular Hasidic Jewish world. Education is not monolithic. Parents make those choices for their children. People should be permitted to sacrifice Western comforts to emphasize and preserve their way of life.
The Amish do it too. They often forgo modern technology (not just smartphones like many Hasidic Jews, but even air conditioning!) and live a blue-collar farming life. They also often have poorer literacy skills compared to the general population, with one study finding that 12% of Amish read at or lower than a sixth-grade level compared to just 2.6% of non-Amish, and stop formal schooling altogether after eighth grade. People in these communities find comfort, purpose and meaning living according to the traditions they seek to preserve in a world that they perceive as hostile to a simpler life.
In Wisconsin v. Yoder, the Supreme Court held that the Amish Mennonite Church had a religious right to refuse compulsory English education. There is a long line of cases that also protect the rights of parents to decide how to raise their children.
If the yeshiva issue gets to the Supreme Court, Hasidic people will likely win especially given the very conservative composition of the court. As a result, they will become more entrenched in anti-secular education ideology and view it as a victory against attacks on their religion. It will, unfortunately, create even more resistance to voluntary secular education.
Native Americans were once forced into boarding schools to rob them of their way of life and language, reeducating them in the name of assimilating and integrating them into society. The horrific motto was “kill the Indian, and save the man.” Hasidic Jewish boys in czarist Russia were forcibly conscripted and reeducated to abandon their way of life.
Of course, New York State’s attempted coercion is much more subtle and humane today, and even allows Hasidic people the ability to maintain their faith, schools and customs. And so you might ask: What harm is there in improving English literacy, studying civics, and math? But the historical parallels and rationale are the same. Why can’t these people just live like everyone else? Speak the same language. Think the same way. Get the same jobs. Conform to societal norms. And that is wrong.
Re: NY Hasidic group demands right to only religious education - Spock - 09-13-2022
It is not the purpose of education to turn children into ignorant bigoted clones of their parents.