Over the weekend, New York Times reporters Eliza Shapiro and Brian Rosenthal published a carefully reported exposé about the private school system run by the Hasidic Jewish community in New York. For decades, this insular community — which largely separates itself from the wider world, including a large majority of Jewish people — has operated its own piecemeal system of religious schools or yeshivas whose goal is "to educate children in Jewish law, prayer and tradition — and to wall them off from the secular world." Students at these gender-segregated schools spend most of their classroom time on religious instruction, leaving them with very little basic education in science, math, history or other skills necessary in the modern world. The inevitable outcome, Shapiro and Rosenthal report, is that many are trapped "in a cycle of joblessness and dependency." At one school mentioned in the article, more than 1,000 students took New York State's standardized reading and math test, and not a single one passed.
Despite these failures, however, Shapiro and Rosenthal write that the schools "have found ways of tapping into enormous sums of government money, collecting more than $1 billion in the past four years alone."
