NEW: The Hasidic Jewish community runs scores of private boys’ schools that have gotten over $1 billion in public money. But a NYT investigation found they are denying students a basic education, trapping generations of kids in poverty. With
@ElizaShapiro
:

nytimes.com
In Hasidic Enclaves, Failing Private Schools Flush with Public Money
New York’s Hasidic Jewish religious schools have benefited from $1 billion in government funding in the last four years but are

In Hasidic Enclaves, Failing Private Schools Flush With Public Money
New York’s Hasidic Jewish religious schools have benefited from $1 billion in government funding in the last four years but are unaccountable to outside oversight.

In Hasidic Enclaves, Failing Private Schools Flush With Public Money

New York’s Hasidic Jewish religious schools have benefited from $1 billion in government funding in the last four years but are unaccountable to outside oversight.

By Eliza Shapiro and Brian M. Rosenthal | Photographs by Jonah Markowitz

Sept. 11, 2022
Updated 10:26 a.m. ET

The Hasidic Jewish community has long operated one of New York’s largest private schools on its own terms, resisting any outside scrutiny of how its students are faring. ... But in 2019, the school, the Central United Talmudical Academy, agreed to give state standardized tests in reading and math to more than 1,000 students. ... Every one of them failed. ... Students at nearly a dozen other schools run by the Hasidic community recorded similarly dismal outcomes that year, a pattern that under ordinary circumstances would signal an education system in crisis. But where other schools might be struggling because of underfunding or mismanagement, these schools are different. They are failing by design.

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.

The schools appear to be operating in violation of state laws that guarantee children an adequate education. Even so, The Times found, the Hasidic boys’ schools have found ways of tapping into enormous sums of government money, collecting more than $1 billion in the past four years alone. ... Warned about the problems over the years, city and state officials have avoided taking action, bowing to the influence of Hasidic leaders who push their followers to vote as a bloc and have made safeguarding the schools their top political priority.

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Eliza Shapiro is a reporter covering New York City education. She joined The Times in 2018 and grew up in New York, attending public and private schools in Manhattan and Brooklyn. @elizashapiro
https://twitter.com/elizashapiro

Brian M. Rosenthal is an investigative reporter on the Metro desk of The Times and the winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. @brianmrosenthal • Facebook
https://twitter.com/brianmrosenthal
https://www.facebook.com/brianmrosenthal

A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 11, 2022, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Failing Schools, Public Funds. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe