18 Hasidic schools failed to provide basic education, New York City finds
NEW YORK — Eighteen private schools run by the Hasidic Jewish community have been breaking the law by not providing their students with an adequate secular education, New York City officials said Friday.
The findings were an extraordinary rebuke of the schools, known as yeshivas, which receive hundreds of millions of dollars in public money annually but have long resisted outside oversight.
The determinations about the schools, which offer intensive religious lessons in Yiddish but little instruction in English, math or other secular subjects, marked the first instance of the city concluding that private schools had failed to provide a sufficient education.
The move was all the more remarkable because it was made by a city government that has shied away from criticizing the politically influential Hasidic community. And it stemmed from a long-stalled investigation that spanned eight years and two mayoral administrations
and was often hobbled by political interference and bureaucratic inertia.
If the state Education Department upholds the findings, as is expected, the schools could be required to submit detailed improvement plans and undergo government monitoring. The law, however, does not make clear what consequences the schools might face if they do not commit to improving.
A spokesperson for the city's Department of Education said in a statement that the agency had performed a “thorough, fair review” of the Hasidic schools.
“As always, our goal is
to build trust, work with the community, and ensure schools are in compliance with state education law and regulations,” the spokesperson, Nathaniel Styer, said. “Our goal is to educate children, not to punish the adults.”
A spokesperson for some of the yeshivas, Richard Bamberger, said in a statement that the Hasidic community “rejects the attempt to measure the efficacy of yeshiva education by applying a skewed set of technical requirements.”
“Utilizing a government checklist devised and enforced by lawyers may help explain the state of public education,” he said. “It is designed to obscure rather than illuminate the beauty and success of yeshiva education.”
Advocates for yeshiva reform said they were cautiously optimistic about what the findings would yield.
“We hope that the completion of this investigation compels the city and Mayor Eric Adams to act on behalf of thousands of students who are being deprived of their right to a sound basic education,” said Beatrice Weber, executive director of Yaffed, a group of former students and parents whose complaints gave rise to the investigation.
The action by the city follows reporting by The New York Times that found that scores of all-boys Hasidic schools in Brooklyn and the lower Hudson Valley had denied their students an adequate secular education, and that teachers in some of the schools had used corporal punishment to enforce order.
The Hasidim, a fervently religious segment of the larger Orthodox Jewish community, operate more than 200 gender-segregated schools of varying quality across the state.