Enforce Education for All

The Central United Talmudical Academy, a private school operated by the Hasidic Jewish community, gave state standardized tests in reading and math to more than 1,000 students in 2019. Every student failed. In comparison, the average pass rate for all public schools for the same exact testing was 49 percent. Young Advocates for Fair Education (YAFFED), a group of individuals raised in New York’s Hasidic Jewish community, reported that the education they received at Jewish yeshiva schools did not develop them enough to make healthy life decisions and sustain themselves after they graduated. This blatant lack of oversight can be traced directly to the Department of Education.

The New York Times recently published an article detailing the low quality education that Hasidic schools provide. However, the Department of Education has been “investigating” these schools since Bill de Blasio was mayor. Attempts to regulate private schools during that time were met with extreme backlash from a large number of religious leaders. Many people from the Hasidic Jewish community expressed their concerns about the government overstepping and restricting what yeshivas are able to teach. But so far, none of the legislation passed has limited religious lessons. Instead, it promotes secular education and standardized testing.

Though religious freedom is one of our nation’s most protected principles, it cannot come at the cost of a basic education. YAFFED has alleged that some Hasidic yeshivas barely taught any English and arithmetic, with little to no secular instruction. Most of these schools offer reading and math just four days a week for 90 minutes a day and only for children between the ages of eight and 12. The primary focus of these schools is religion, including rigorous classes of study of the Torah, which aren’t in English most of the time. A YAFFED survey uncovered that boys graduate from yeshivas at 18 with third or fourth grade reading levels. This result is a dire problem because without a proper education of basic literature and mathematics, children can be sucked into a disadvantaged life.

Since Hasidic Jewish children are the victims of unregulated schools and are not learning basic life skills, a cycle of poverty is created in their communities. In the future, this poverty will hit New York hardest in the communities where most kids were not educated properly and left to their own devices. We will see disproportionately higher rates of low-income households in neighborhoods with the most graduates from yeshivas because they will have limited work options to provide for themselves. In fact, a single year of primary school (that includes secular education) increases wages earned later in life by up to 15 percent for boys and even higher for girls.

There should be stricter laws for private schools to ensure that children are getting the proper education they deserve. Private or charter schools, for example, can offer many things that public schools can’t, such as religion classes and smaller class sizes. But by law, they must give instruction equivalent to public schools. Yeshivas that do not abide should not be shut down, as they do provide important instruction to their students about their faith, but they should be strictly monitored by the Department of Education to change their curriculum. Enforcing laws that require private schools to follow minimum academic standards could create change in those schools. The government must be more proactive in inspections and testing because every student deserves the right to a proper education.