New York’s highest court made mostly the right decision in upholding the state and city’s ability to regulate religious schools and hold them accountable when they fail to provide an education in secular basics that’s substantially equivalent to what the public schools deliver. But the court should’ve gone one step further — and affirmed the government’s power to shut down schools when they chronically miseducate their kids in English, math, science and social studies.
Unfortunately, the state Legislature and governor already shamefully backed off these core principles in this year’s state budget, pushing back requirements that such schools have to comply with state law until 2032.
What’s at stake? More than 50,000 students in the state are enrolled in ultra-Orthodox Hasidic and Haredi yeshivas. The number of kids in Jewish religious schools is much larger than that. There are also many thousands of children in other kinds of parochial schools.
It’s the absolute right of families to decide to give their children a religious education — be that inculcation in Catholic, Jewish, Muslim or any other faith. But with the right of schools to teach Talmud, the Quran or the Gospels comes a concomitant responsibility that they not fail to imbue boys and girls with the fundamental skills and knowledge they need to thrive in our complex society and economy.
Many religious K-12 schools do an exemplary job teaching core secular subjects, but some unquestionably give them short shrift, breaking state law in the process The problem has been most well-established in a subset of ultra-Orthodox yeshivas that teach the fundamentals of Judaism but insufficiently touch on other necessary subjects. This is a scandal, and it cannot stand.
For decades, advocates have tried to get schools inspected, and tried to ensure that when it is well established that they aren’t living up to the law and their responsibilities, someone in government requires them to correct course. But for decades, every attempt to do this effectively has been met with howls of protest, as though the slightest bit of regulation on the curriculum of a private school is tantamount to anti-American tyranny.
Nonsense. Regardless of their faith, children deserve the tools to survive and thrive in the United States in 2025.
With respect to the new ruling, the state’s high court was hearing an appeal from a group of parents challenging the state Education Department, which set up new requirements that schools deemed to violate the state law requiring substantial equivalency “shall no longer be deemed a school which provides compulsory education.” The parents took umbrage, arguing that it’s an affront to the right to freely exercise one’s religion.
The Court of Appeals got it right. “The provisions merely state that the nonpublic school does not provide substantially equivalent instruction — a determination well within the authority provided to the commissioner by the statute,” wrote Judge Jenny Rivera in the unanimous opinion. “The parent or custodian must determine how then to ensure their compliance with the education law.”
At the same time, the state said the law doesn’t give the state power to shut schools down when they prove incapable of or unwilling to meet their core responsibilities. That’s a serious mistake: A religious school must still function as a school. If a madrassah teaches children the Quran and hardly any English or history, it is illegally failing kids. The same is true of a Jewish yeshiva.
