New York State is renewing its effort to impose rules for secular education in yeshivas and other religious and private schools, including Catholic, Amish, and high-end college preparatory schools.
State law mandates that all children in non-public schools follow curricula that are “substantially equivalent” to those in use in the public schools. In the last go around, yeshiva advocates effectively challenged both the substance of the proposed rules, which they said cut into time normally spent on religious studies; and, more fundamentally, the notion that a public authority could dictate to religious schools what they have to teach.
Debate on these issues is again heating up and there is a formal public comment period until the end of May at which point the State Education Department will review the comments, make revisions and then send the final regulations to the Board of Regents for adoption. So in the coming weeks we will be closely following this story. But there are several things that come quickly to mind.
For one thing, the notion that anything in play in the public schools in terms of instruction is superior to the rigorous fare available to students in yeshivas is laughable. Think about Chumash and Nach in terms of reading comprehension and history. Think about Gemara in terms of textual analysis. Think about halachic calculations in terms of mathematical skills. And this is to say nothing about the fact that yeshiva students spend far more time in class than their non-public school counterparts. Do these and other remarkable characteristics count for nothing in the grand calculus of education?
Let’s also not forget that public schools hardly commend themselves as role models. The question “Why can’t Johnny read?” resonates just as loudly today as it did 50 years ago and is just as relevant today as it was then. Indeed, NYC officials are counting on an infusion of federal funding to mount a full court press to improve child literacy in the public schools. One report in the New York Daily News, for instance, says that officials are hoping the coming school year will be a watershed moment in the long-running effort to improve how city schools teach kids to read. Mayor Eric Adams and Schools Chancellor David Banks have spoken frequently of late about making student literacy a priority, yet they have also acknowledged daunting obstacles. Advocates also warn that the city could squander this opportunity presented by the federal funding if officials don’t come up with long-term plans for how to make reforms stick. The Daily News report also noted that battles over how best to teach reading stretch back decades, and city schools have typically used a patchwork of reading curricula and that fewer than 50% of elementary and middle school students scored “proficient” on the reading section of recent state exams.
The long and short of it is that yeshivas have precious little to learn from the public schools, which are engulfed in turmoil and flux. Bottom line, we should not miss the forest for all the trees. The attempt to assert the government’s operating jurisdiction over yeshivas is an insidious one. Barely a week goes by without this or that report of parents objecting at local school board meetings to what the woke crowd that dominates education in America today is teaching their kids. When the government seeks to dictate yeshiva curricula, parental pushback is additionally supported by the constitutionally protected right of parents to control the education of their children in their family religion.
It’s time that the New York education authorities got off their high horses and respected the overarching value of a traditional yeshiva education and stopped interfering with it just because they think they can.
