In Quebec, Canada, two former members of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish religious sect, the Tash Hasidim, brought a suit against the province and the religious group because they were denied a legally mandated secular education when they were children. They want to force provincial authorities to ensure Tash Hasidic children are taught required subjects like math, English and French.
In 2014, Quebec’s youth protection agency investigated education in the Tash community and concluded that boys were taught "little to nothing" from the provincial curriculum. A youth protection official who testified at the trial reported that almost 90% of the 320 boys who were assessed at the time had poor English and math skills. Even after new rules were adopted in 2017, about 100 boys were found deficient. A plaintiff in the case, Yohanan Lowen, testified that boys in the Tash school studied Jewish scripture from 6 AM until past 9 PM six days a week. When Lowen left the sect, he could not speak either French or English. A representative for the Tash Hasidim who testified at the trial claimed the Canadian province was trying to “impose assimilation” on a group that wanted to preserve its unique culture.
A similar battle is taking place in New York, but state officials, especially Governor Andrew Cuomo, have been hesitant to take on a political influential religious bloc and opposition to state enforcement of education law by Hasidic communities and the Roman Catholic Church. Religious cults oppose school monitors because they want to control their children and prevent them from making different life choices when they become adults. Catholic opposition to school monitors, since Catholics live in this world and their schools usually perform well, is a little more puzzling.
In 2015, the New York City investigated the quality of secular education provided at more than three dozen ultra-Orthodox yeshivas, Jewish religious schools in Brooklyn and reported that serious deficiencies in a number of schools. In 2018, the New York City Schools Chancellor reported to the State Education Commissioner that half of the schools cited in the initial 2015 complaint had either refused to meet with city investigators or simply did not respond to requests for meetings.
Young Advocates for Fair Education (YAFFEED), representing many yeshiva alumni and teachers filed a lawsuit in July 2018 arguing that the state, in violation of its own constitution, was illegally permitting ultra-Orthodox Jewish schools to deny their students the kind of education needed to function in the broader society. According to the complaint, 115,000 children attend ultra-Orthodox yeshivas in New York State. There are over eighty Hasidic yeshivas in New York City alone. A survey of yeshiva graduates and parents conducted by YAFFEED found that only a quarter of respondents reported that they received any secular education while attending ultra-Orthodox yeshiva high schools.
The executive director of YAFFED, Naftuli Moster, attended Hasidic Yeshivas (elementary and high schools) in Brooklyn, New York. He founded YAFFED after discovering that he and his friends had received a fundamentally inadequate education in their religious school.
Article XI of the New York State Constitution mandates that the state legislature “provide for the maintenance and support of a system of free common schools, wherein all the children of this state may be educated.” In 1995, the State Court of Appeals ruled that the education article of the Constitution “requires the State to offer all children the ‘opportunity’ for a “sound basic education.” The state’s Board of Regents and Education Department are supposed to ensure that these mandates are met.
But a spokesman for New York Governor Cuomo praised granting religious institutions an exemption from state education laws claiming it balanced “the unique needs of yeshivas with the high educational standards we require for every New York student.”
Recently, the New York State Board of Regents, the governing board for education in the state, and the Department of Education, backed down after proposing a regulation that local school districts ensure that religious schools provide students with an education “substantially equivalent” to that in public schools. The Education Department received over 140,000 comments, overwhelmingly in opposition to requiring local school officials to review whether religious schools in their districts abided by state law. Religious groups, who mobilized the responses from their members, argue that regulation that would require them to obey state laws infringes on parental and religious rights.
What about the rights of children who attend these schools, rights that the State Education Department is supposed to protect?
Governor Andrew Cuomo also forced the legislature to jettison a bill authorizing mandated oversight with decision-making power by state-appointed officials for two troubled school districts on Long Island. Under a replacement bill, state monitors only serve in an advisory capacity.
The Roman Catholic Church in New York State lobbied hard to prevent the appointment of school monitors with authority, which at first seems surprising, since according to the New York State Association of Independent Schools, fewer than 2% of private and religious in the state are considered underperforming.
I think the underlying reason for Catholic Church opposition to education monitors is the churches efforts to repress human sexuality, opposition to sex education in schools, and proselytizing for an abstinence only curriculum. While sex education is currently not required in New York public schools, that could change quickly if a bill, before the legislature to ensure age-appropriate but comprehensive sex be taught in grades K-12, becomes law. According to the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), New York has one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the country. New York City recently issued guidelines for sex education in all its high schools, however, a NYCLU report concluded that sex education across the state “is inconsistent at best, as well as incomplete and inaccurate in a number of schools.”
The New York State Catholic Conference leads the opposition to the sex education bill. It takes a position espoused by church authorities that the religious and moral beliefs of parents must be primary and they should decide what children, including teenagers, learn about sex. Meanwhile “The Church strongly urges a state reinvestment in programs that teach sexual abstinence.” The Church’s opposition to comprehensive sex education in schools is based on a 1951 address by Pope Pius XII and a 1981 statement by Pope St. John Paul II where they argued that sex education should “not be primarily a matter of giving explicit information at all, but rather it should be a matter of inculcating modesty, purity, chastity, and morality, a matter of teaching the sixth and ninth commandments.”
New York State and Canadian provisional governments must now decide whether religious sects have absolute control over the children of their members and whether a larger religious body can dictate education policy based on its religious beliefs in nations that supposedly abide by the principle of “separation of church and state.”
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