New York Ends Funding for 2 Yeshivas That Fail to Teach Basic Skills

The decision is the first time that the State Department of Education has withheld money from private Hasidic schools for not teaching sufficient math and English skills.

A decade after allegations first surfaced that schools operated by New York’s Hasidic Jewish community were denying children a basic education, the state government is for the first time cutting off funding for schools it says have refused to improve.

The New York State Education Department will no longer provide crucial funding for two all-boys Hasidic schools in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and will ensure that all of their students are enrolled in different schools by the fall. The effective closure of the two schools, which are known as yeshivas, is the strongest action taken in New York to crack down on schools over their failure to comply with education law.

And it’s a move that many Hasidic leaders and even critics of the yeshiva system doubted the state would ever make.

That’s partially because of the long and tangled process that the state created to penalize schools found to be breaking the law, which mandates that all children receive an adequate secular education, even in private schools.

Resisting outside oversight into religious education has become perhaps the top political priority for the Hasidic community, which has long maintained a significant influence in local politics and tends to vote as a bloc.

The insular community’s yeshivas, which rely heavily on taxpayer dollars, teach religious lessons in Yiddish and Hebrew for most of the school day, and offer little instruction in English or math.