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.
While NYC public schools are being drained of money, funding is flowing to private religious Hasidic schools.These schools have received $1 billion+ in public money but are denying students a secular education, trapping generations of kids in poverty.It’s an issue not unique to New York City — in the hyper-segregated East Ramapo Central School District, a white majority took over the school board in 2009, denying a generation of public school students an adequate education.For years, district leaders in East Ramapo have extracted resources from public schools, which are almost entirely attended by students of color, in order to lavishly fund yeshivas attended by white students.State leaders often claim their commitment to an equitable, high-quality education. But if they mean it, they have to do more.ALL students deserve access to a basic education free from violence and discrimination.
Every sentence is insane.
A public school student costs the government about $28,000 a year, a private school student in one of these schools less than $2,000. Most of that is federal and state money and has nothing to do with school board decisions. The "$1 billion+" is stretched out over years. (The annual NYC school budget is about $38 billion, I estimate Jewish schools get about 0.7% of that while their students represent about 5% of the total in public schools.) The public schools in East Ramapo are paid for overwhelmingly by the taxes of people who do not send their children to those schools. Every community chooses the members of their school boards, but when a religious Jewish community does the same, they are racist "whites" who are trying to suck the blood of the students of color.
While East Ramapo public school students are recognized by the state as having high needs compared to other districts, there is substantial income and property wealth within the district....East Ramapo is the most fiscally stressed district in the state, according to the New York State Comptroller. This is not because the district lacks wealth, but because white voters refuse to fund public schools.
0 comments:
Post a Comment