A damning New York Times exposé on the state of government-funded Hassidic schools in New York City alleges pupils there lack proper education.
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"The Hassidic 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," the Times piece, which appeared in the Sunday edition, says.
The article, which is based on the translation of dozens of documents from Yiddish and interviews of more than 275 people, shows that the officials in those institutions have largely managed to avoid outside intervention in curricula, despite the public funds that get incorporated into their budgets.
"The leaders of New York's Hassidic 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 piece says. "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," it continued.
According to the story, those most impacted are boys, with the apparent failures spanning more than 100 schools for boys through Brookly and the lower Hudson Valley, turning 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 paper adds that "the schools appear to be operating in violation of state laws that guarantee children an adequate education. Even so, The Times found, the Hassidic boys' schools have found ways of tapping into enormous sums of government money, collecting more than $1 billion in the past four years alone."
