Good morning. It's Thursday. We'll take a closer look at The New York Times's investigation that found that students in some Hasidic schools were among the lowest performing on standardized tests in the state. |
 | | Jonah Markowitz for The New York Times |
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This week the State Board of Regents approved regulations aimed at holding private schools to minimum academic standards. The long-scheduled Regents' vote came after a New York Times investigation showed that students in many of New York's Hasidic Jewish schools have been denied a basic education. I asked Brian M. Rosenthal — who with Eliza Shapiro spent months doing hundreds of interviews and reading thousands of pages of documents — to put their investigation and the state's new regulations in perspective. |
There had been warnings that the Hasidic yeshivas were falling short. Who sounded alarms, and why didn't state officials take action sooner? |
We found that people have been raising red flags for at least a decade. |
Most prominently, in 2012, a New York City yeshiva graduate named Naftuli Moster founded an organization called the Young Advocates for Fair Education, which has been pushing for more secular education in the city's Hasidic boys' schools. He's held many news conferences, filed lawsuits and led a group of former students and parents in submitting a formal complaint. In Rockland County, north of the city, another group also filed a lawsuit. Many news outlets have written articles over the years. |
And behind the scenes, at least three former employees at the New York State Education Department had warned their superiors, we found. |
State officials tried to address the problems in 2018, when they drafted new regulations spelling out how much secular instruction all private schools must provide. But their initial proposal was thrown out in court on procedural grounds, and they withdrew a second proposal after fierce opposition from Hasidic leaders. That led to the latest, watered-down proposal, which is what the Regents approved this week. |
Officials have not taken any other major actions over the last decade. Part of the reason that state officials have not done more is that Hasidic leaders have a lot of political power. Many of them push their followers to vote as a bloc, and they turn out in large numbers. |
The rabbis also have made resisting government intervention in the schools their central policy priority. |
The net effect of all that is that the Hasidic leaders have essentially turned their community into an important constituency of largely single-issue voters. |
Is there any parallel to other religious-affiliated schools in New York? Do the schools run by the Roman Catholic archdioceses take the state's standard tests, and how do they fare? |
There are simply no other schools in New York State that perform as poorly as the Hasidic boys' schools, and that includes all of the other religious schools in the state. |
In 2019, the last year with full state data available for comparisons, about 30 Hasidic boys' schools administered standardized tests in Grades 3 through 8 for reading and math. Of the thousands of boys who took the tests and we have results for, 99 percent failed. In many schools, every single student failed. |
Other religious-affiliated schools, by contrast, performed much more like public schools, where nearly half of students passed. |
You asked about Catholic schools. That year, 288 Catholic schools administered tests, and 55 percent of students passed. In Islamic schools, the passing rate was 57 percent; in Greek Orthodox schools, it was 71 percent; and in Seventh Day Adventists' schools, it was 36 percent. (Alex Lemonides did much of the data analysis for the story, and Malika Khurana helped analyze the data, too.) |
Our reporting also went far beyond test scores. In addition to interviewing current and former students, we talked to dozens of teachers, and we reviewed hundreds of pages of student work. It all told the same story. |
What is a boy's day in a Hasidic yeshiva like? How much time is spent on English and math or science and history? |
Here is a portrait of a day in a Hasidic boys' school, based on our interviews with dozens of current and former students, parents and teachers: |
Boys usually arrive pretty early — at 7:30 a.m., sometimes earlier, and they typically go to school six days a week, every day but Saturday. |
They spend most of their day in religious lessons, which can be very intense. Their religion teacher, who is a rabbi and is their instructor for all of the religion portion of the day, will read aloud from the text that is being studied that day, and the boys will follow along in their own books, occasionally repeating words or answering questions. |
These lessons can go for hours, and students often cannot go to the bathroom during lectures. As boys get older, they increasingly spend part of class with a study partner, discussing material together. |
Most of the Hasidic boys' schools offer secular education in only English reading and math (no science, history or civics) four days a week — Monday through Thursday. Those lessons almost always come at the end of the school day. If the students arrive at 7:30 a.m., they might then start their secular education eight or nine hours later, at 3:30 p.m. or 4:30 p.m. Those lessons typically last for 90 minutes, or maybe even a little less. |
While, as I say, the religion instruction is intense, this time is much more laid back, reflecting how the schools do not prioritize secular education. At the end of a long day, students often let loose, relaxing and playing pranks on teachers. |
How much corporal punishment is carried out in Hasidic yeshivas? |
In Hasidic boys' schools, some teachers regularly smack, slap and kick their students, our reporting found. This corporal punishment usually takes place during those intense religion lessons, not the secular studies sessions. |
During religious study, we found that rabbis hit students with rulers, belts and sticks wrapped in electrical tape, sometimes for minor misbehavior. For example, many recent graduates described being hit for not pointing their finger at the word being read aloud by the rabbi. In the past, Hasidic classrooms were more brutal environments. Recently, some schools have asked teachers to be less violent in disciplining students. But we found that more "mild" corporal punishment remains very common. Virtually all of the dozens of parents we interviewed said their sons had been hit at least once. Several said they had sought to protect their children by "tipping" their teachers, usually about $100 a year. |
Will the regulations approved by the Regents change the way the Hasidic yeshivas operate? |
Maybe. The regulations clearly state that the schools must teach English, reading, math, science, history and civics. They also lay out clear rules for how schools must either proactively prove that they are providing a basic education or submit to visits by local officials to assess the adequacy of their education. |
It would seem that this would force Hasidic boys' schools to offer more secular education. But the schools have vowed not to change, and they still could challenge the rules in court. |
There are also questions about whether the schools could take advantage of loopholes in the regulations, and whether local officials will enforce the rules. |
The state has also set long timelines for this process, so it may be awhile before we see if the regulations are working. |
Enjoy a sunny day with temperatures in the mid-70s. Tonight will be clear with lows in the high 50s. |
In effect until Sept. 26 (Rosh Hashana). |
 | | Elizabeth Frantz for The New York Times |
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It was New York University graduation day in 1995. Hundreds of us sat in the heat and sun at Washington Square Park, wearing synthetic purple robes and mortarboards while awaiting the conferral of our degrees. |
L. Jay Oliva, the university's president, and the commencement speakers and recipients of honorary degrees including Kitty Carlisle Hart, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Clifford Glenwood Shull, Jankarel Gevers and Sidney Poitier all delivered eloquent remarks. |
Then Neil Diamond took the stage. He wondered aloud why he, among all these learned and accomplished people, had been invited. Perhaps, he mused, it was because he could carry a tune. |
Then he went into "Louie Louie." |
I still get choked up when I think about it. |
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B. |
| Ashley Shannon Wu, Francis Mateo and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. |
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