If you don’t educate your children this time, I SHALL DO SUCH THINGS.
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World’s best job: Sit around your entire career futzing with proposals for reform of ultraorthodox education knowing nothing will ever happen. The ultimate sinecure.
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Yeah I know you think a big glossy Sun NYT exposé will make ALL the difference. You doodoo.
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A reminder from the comment thread:
These [groups have also been allowed to be exempt] from the obligation to vaccination — [which] they are skirting based on their religious beliefs. Paying them to undermine public health [along with paying them to undermine education] is another wrong we can no longer tolerate for the health of the rest of us. Measles and now polio. No no no.
Another one:
As a public health physician since the 1980’s, I can also note that the disregard of the schools for vaccination requirements are a (large) part of the peril highlighted by yesterday’s polio disaster declaration in New York state, and the detection of polio in the waste water of multiple NY counties, the latest Nassau. The US school age vaccination rates for polio in the US approach 94 %; rates are much lower among yeshiva students, contributing to silent spread of an almost eliminated infection in the US.
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Systemic welfare fraud is something else we allow them.
The article also talks about teachers violently abusing their students. It appears to be endemic. We know that rates of sexual abuse are high in these communities as well.
No one cares. Nothing will change.
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Tell you what. I’ve been studying and following the ultraorthodox scandal, in the US and Israel, for years. I fully admit that I just do not get it. Israel’s ultras are routinely violent against the state as well – street riots galore. No one cares. Nothing will change.
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I will say this: The NYT piece is a brilliant, even exciting example of fearless investigative journalism. The one hundred percent outraged, very lengthy comment thread, full of readers describing themselves as absolutely shocked by the educational gutter the article depicts, tells you what? It tells you that all that’s ever been needed for ordinary taxpayers to be sick with disgust over a scofflaw, rapidly growing, hopelessly welfare dependent subculture in this country is for our paper of record to find the guts to write about it.
Once again, nothing will change. But talk about making the situation graphic. A final comment from the thread:
I never thought I would see a major news publication actually have the audacity to describe the situation accurately, bluntly, and plainly.
Why does this take guts?
Damned if I know.
September 12th, 2022 at 12:38AM
But isn’t the answer obviously that we “allow” these things b/c they’re legal? Corporal punishment in schools is legal, designing your own curriculum in private schools is legal, using public funds for secular purposes in religious schools is legal. Even vaccine refusal is legal. None of these things can be prohibited only for Jews, and there isn’t a lot of desire to proscribe them universally.
The only legal question here is whether the yeshivas violate NY’s “substantial equivalency” law for private schools, but no one knows what private schools are supposed to be substantially equivalent to in the first place. To the curriculum of an average public school, or the best public school? To the educational outcomes of the average public? The outcomes of the best public? People have avoided clarifying this statute for obvious reasons – the average NY public school is embarrassingly bad and no one wants to be equivalent to it. The new regulations seem to answer the question by circumventing it – a nonpublic school is substantially equivalent if a state accrediting body deems it to be. It is if we say it is! How long do you think before the Satmar file a likely completely merited lawsuit alleging 1A violation by the state accrediting agency? It’s a dumb solution.
September 12th, 2022 at 4:45AM
Jeez, you’re more of a hippie than I am, Rita! Who knew? It’s all relative, man… You make me feel like an old stick in the mud, forced to defend objective testing standards and the law and all…
I mean, as to the law:
New York’s prohibition on corporal punishment is only limited to public schools. This means that some private schools may be allowed to use corporal punishment. Because New York does not have a law that allows private schools to use corporal punishment, parents may have to consent to this form of punishment through a waiver when the child enrolls with the school. However, just because a parent signs a waiver does not mean that excessive or severe forms of corporal punishment are always allowed.
Even if the average enlightened American considers a school system in which parents are required to sign a form saying it’s fine with them if their teachers hit their children (and here again I assume your relativism as to ‘excessive or severe’ comes into play) not perverted, the lawbound person will certainly be a stickler in wanting to use the law to defend very young defenseless children against grown men who hurt them. They might even consider it quite a lapse that we have not covered private as well as public schools in our laws against vicious and degrading behavior (I know – what tightass absolutism…) in regard to children trapped by their… unusual… parents in closed schoolrooms within communities notorious for refusing to cooperate with legal authorities, and sadistically vile to members of the community who report abuse of any kind.
Most scandalous in what you’ve said, though, is what I take to be your belief that even a school system which, when its students are tested on primary civilizational skills – basic literacy, knowledge of the language of the country in which one lives, simple arithmetic – yields an outcome of total failure should experience no negative responses from the civilization that must provide permanent welfare financing for the unemployable people the school system is producing. Here, surely, in the shared realm of employment and civic responsibility, we might discover some reasonably objective information about acceptable and unacceptable forms of education.
‘The Central United Talmudical Academy spans an entire city block in Williamsburg. All its students who took state tests in 2019 failed.’
September 12th, 2022 at 3:16PM
The law could potentially be many things, but it isn’t any of the things you want, at least not yet. NY could outlaw all corporal punishment. There may be unexpected downsides to that (presumably there was some reason they exempted private schools in the first place?), but I can’t think of many. But this isn’t something the DoE can do; that’s a legislative task.
And even that is way easier than holding schools to testing standards. The problem with the law is that it has to be neutral, so any law that sets minimum testing standards will necessarily catch in its dragnet hundreds of public schools that also fail to meet these minimum standards you lay out. So what should it do with those schools? Shut them down too? We tried that with NCLB for a decade; very little improvement, lots of shuttling kids between different failing schools. Given how many more crappy non-Haredi schools there are than Haredi ones, any state regulation demanding minimum testing outcomes will immediately become a big enough scandal for public and other private schools that it will totally overshadow any worries about the Haredi schools.
I assume that’s why the Regents settled on this accreditation workaround, because that way they can selectively punish the yeshivas without also getting caught up with failing public schools. But, that comes with its own risks – eg, if the yeshivas can show that failing non-yeshivas are being treated differently by the accreditors, they will have a First Amendment case that the regulations aren’t neutral.
I have no hippie proclivities, but do I think the Haredi Jews pose a very salient challenge to liberalism and are interesting on those grounds. In this case, they’re not violating any present laws; just all of our norms. But how far can a pluralistic and tolerant state go in legally enforcing norms? By the way, I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but there’s an interesting ethnography out recently about Kiryas Joel by Nomi Stolzenberg, who back in the ’80s also wrote a seminal essay defending the logic of the (then-Christian fundamentalist, now Haredi and others’) claim that secular liberal schooling is not value-neutral as it claims, but actually indoctrination into a holistic worldview that excludes the possibility of religious truth and is therefore anti-religious. She also hates the Haredi, maybe somewhat less than you do, but from the same liberal common good-type position.
September 12th, 2022 at 5:05PM
Doubling down on your Abbie Hoffman tendencies – The public schools are crap, the haredi schools are crap – dig it? The haredi Jews dig it, man – total failure on primitive intellectual tests is how they roll. Hey they aren’t breaking any laws!
Actually they are – lots of them. All sorts of laws, rules, and regulations. Financial, sexual, Medicaid, tax, real estate, rioting, public health regulations on large gatherings during covid, assault, gender segregation – we all know this. Sometimes, as in Lakewood NJ, the authorities decide to break up village-wide, rabbi-run, criminal rings; but the endemic lawlessness of these groups – like their enforced endemic ignorance – is never seriously messed with. And listen – on schools:
An earlier article on this topic presented data showing that the standardized test failure rate of students in yeshivas was far worse than that of students in public schools, including public schools in impoverished areas.
Chill, UD! Maybe you like to smoke some occasional dope; ultraorthodox Jews like to rip off the public school system – the public everything – because … that’s the way they roll. Just like their idol Donald Trump says (they voted for him as a bloc; some showed up at the Capitol ready to… roll.. on Jan 6) keep the deep state the fuck out of our way of life.
You say I hate them. There’s no way in the world whatever hostility I feel for them can come anywhere NEAR the contempt they feel for me. And of course for you.
September 12th, 2022 at 5:55PM
But again, the problem is that the laws are religion-neutral, including the welfare laws. So in the specific instances where they commit legal fraud, then it’s easy enough to prosecute them (or should be, though of course politics doesn’t exactly work like that), but it’s not a violation to collect government funding when you technically qualify for it even though, as a matter of norms, it seems like you shouldn’t qualify. If your income is $20k and you have five kids, you qualify for welfare programs, even if it’s also the case that your income is $20k b/c you choose not to work to study Torah all day and you also have many sources of informal support from your community that make you in reality not as poor as you seem on paper. The law can’t account for that without then also withholding welfare from many other people who also have informal sources of support (did someone donate a stroller to you? no food stamps for you then!), or letting other children go hungry for being born to parents who don’t work. Do you see what I’m getting at? This is the problem of liberal neutrality and why the Haredi pose an interesting challenge to liberalism.
You can be outraged at their norm violations, but what law can you write that will restrain them without also creating unintended consequences for non-religious groups that you don’t want to punish? Obviously, to the degree that they do violate already-existing laws like against sexual abuse of minors, you can prosecute them, no question. But where they just exploit the laws to their communal advantage without violating them, what’s the liberal state to do? I think the substantial equivalency statute poses that kind of dilemma. My point is not just that public schools are bad too, so who cares what kinds of schools we have, but that the badness of the average public school makes it difficult to surgically penalize the Haredi schools without wreaking havoc on all the bad schools in the state. I don’t think that’s merely accidental; the secular public schools might be bad b/c the secular public realm is not doing so great right now, which in turn is what turns groups like the Haredi against it. But I’m not trying to praise their alternative, just answer the question in your post about why it’s so hard for secular liberals who vastly outnumber these people to just put the kibosh on all their excesses. Because suppressing them often violates liberal neutrality and liberals don’t want to violate themselves.
Well, whether you hate them or they hate you more, my point was that I think you would like this book, which shares your priors about the liberal common good. It’s not bad b/c she hates the Haredi; it’s pretty good, I think, I’m just reporting her angle.