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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   39255 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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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.

The New York Times has an expose on how ultra-orthodox Jews in NYC are funneling billions in public money for use in their yeshivas. Students are barely taught how to read and write in English (as an example, one couldn't spell "America") and the state requirements are effectively optional or used as a study hall.

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.

Only nine schools in the state had less than 1 percent of students testing at grade level in 2019, the last year for which full data was available. All of them were Hasidic boys’ schools.

The boys’ schools cram in secular studies only after a full day of religious lessons. Most offer reading and math just four days a week, often for 90 minutes a day, and only for children between the ages of 8 and 12. Some discourage further secular study at home. “No English books whatsoever,” one school’s rule book warns.

Their leaders, the grand rabbis, wield significant power, and breaking the rules they set can carry serious consequences. That point was underscored by the more than 50 current Hasidic community members who spoke to The Times only on condition of anonymity, for fear of being exiled and barred from seeing family and friends.

Another former teacher provided hundreds of pages of work sheets from the past five years that showed that 12-year-olds — in their last year of English instruction — could not spell words like “cold” and “America.”

Tax dollars are not supposed to go toward religious education. But public agencies pay private schools to comply with government mandates and manage social services. Hasidic boys’ yeshivas, like other private schools, access dozens of such programs, collecting money that subsidizes their theological curriculum. The Times identified dozens of federal, state and local programs and analyzed how much they have given to yeshivas, looking most closely at the last year before the pandemic. The analysis showed that New York’s Hasidic boys’ schools received more than $375 million from the government in that period [...] they appear to get more government funding on average than other private schools in the state, including other religious schools, the analysis found. The city voucher program that helps low-income families pay for child care now sends nearly a third of its total assistance to Hasidic neighborhoods

This might come as a shock to those who have no experience with Williamsburg, Monroe, Kiryas Joel, or Monsey in the NY tristate area. There is what can be described as a Hasidic Jewish mafia, that violates norms and laws to obtain hegemony, while siphoning resources from the surrounding communities. Towns are genuinely afraid of encroachment by the Hasids, because they move in en masse and quickly obtain town leadership positions and school board positions. They usually vote to reduce all extra funding, like extra-curricular funding for public schools, because their children only attend yeshivas. They label their homes as temples and don't legally marry their wives to reduce their taxes. Towns in subjected areas will purposely reduce sidewalks or veto funding for sidewalks in order to deter Hasids from moving in. Usually they will have a non-Hasidic lawyers go door to door asking to buy property with cash. They are involved in coordinated welfare schemes yet somehow get sweetheart plea deals of no jail time. Kiryas Joel was once the poorest place in all of America, and yet they have their own private security force that follows non-Hasids in SUVs if you drive through their estates, they have an enormous temple and their own state-funded maternity clinic on site and are able to obtain a unique 30 million dollar water aqueduct project.

I'm happy that the NYT is doing solid journalism on this. I kind of gripe with portraying the young as victims and bringing up the Holocaust, but it is what it is. In my mind, the Hasidic power structure is a legitimate problem that needs to be made sense of, because if there is all this corruption at just 200k members, well, in 60 years it will be 1,600,000. They will comprise a majority of America's Jewish community in a few decades.

I'm going to take something completely unintended from this article and ask:

Hasn't the official narrative for the past couple decades been that the reason schools in the U.S. underperform is due to lack of funding?

And thus, shouldn't the suggested solution to Yeshivas underperforming state requirements be to give them more money?

I could swear that the argument regarding, e.g. Baltimore, St. Louis, and yes, New York was that there was simply a large gap between how much money the schools needed and how much they actually received.

Perhaps it is fair to peek into how that money is being spent and closely examining the type and quality of instruction being provided to judge the value of such spending?

I'm not trying to make any larger point with this besides noting how interesting it is that the NYT takes up a story which tacitly admits that funding is, itself, not the end-all be-all for improving education outcomes, as the state tends to measure such outcomes.

If the fear is that organized groups with goals orthogonal to those expected of the school system may be seizing too much control and funneling that money towards priorities other than education on the topics society generally considers important, then we can certainly open this debate up to other groups with similar power.

Hasn't the official narrative for the past couple decades been that the reason schools in the U.S. underperform is due to lack of funding?

Yeah, but it's always been a ridiculous lie. The United States outspends almost every country in the world. The failures of American schools (such that they exist, I would argue that the failures are more with the local demographic stock than with the schools themselves) cannot plausibly be explained by funding at schools that are spending more than Germany, Japan, or our neighbor to the north.

I'm not trying to make any larger point with this besides noting how interesting it is that the NYT takes up a story which tacitly admits that funding is, itself, not the end-all be-all for improving education outcomes, as the state tends to measure such outcomes.

The good news for the NYT and the larger narrative regarding education spending is that no one really bothers to maintain much continuity of analysis between these points. Even better for narrative maintenance is that anyone who notices that Americans actually do very well on PISA testing relative to similar demographic groups (suggesting that there isn't much of a problem with the schools) can be countered with rhetoric around how this demonstrates that schools are racist.

I don't see a toggle for displaying the desired data in the direct link, I assumed people would be able to look at those pretty easily.

I am strongly against using percent of GDP rather than PPP or nominal dollars. The education sector isn't entitled to a fixed percentage of the overall economy.

Using percentage of GDP makes sense in certain circumstances, such as when your trying to analyze the burden the spending puts on the economy but I agree it makes less sense when your comparing national education spending to see who spends more, or when you considering whether spending is increasing over time and how rapid the increase is.

The education sector isn't entitled to a fixed percentage of the overall economy.

No, but to the extent it provides services via humans rather than automation, it is subject to Baumol's cost disease. Ironically, the education you can afford in a country where most talented would-be-educators don't have any better options may be greater, at the same adjusted dollars-per-student price, than the education you can afford in a country where that education really pays off in other sectors of the economy. GDP isn't a good unit against which to compare this, but neither are dollars adjusted by a PPP basket which weighs mass-produced consumer goods along with skilled man-hours.

On the other hand, that's about as much of a steelman as I can come up with before noticing that the education sector may be to blame for this themselves. "Students work on computers at their own pace, teachers are on hand to work with students who are having problems the automated lessons can't handle" was how a few of my best classes were handled, experimentally, decades ago, and it's a tragedy that the closest most kids can get today is "Make a Khan Academy account, then hope you have time for it on top of whatever superannuated one-size-fits-all busywork your teachers assign instead". I'm not sure what happened over those decades, but I don't think that whole "software" thing turned out to be just a fad in the rest of the economy, so I have a suspicion that the possibility of teaching more students better even with fewer teachers was treated as a threat to unionized teachers rather than an opportunity for the kids.

Somewhat unrelated, but I was watching Vinesauce last night, and he was playing a few of those JumpStart games by Knowledge Adventure. The Kindergarten game (yes, seriously, I'm going somewhere with this) got me thinking: could people ever really trust software to educate their kids? Edutainment games are one thing; but serious educational programs, software, and websites have developed to the point that they can serve as legit building blocks for getting through at least public school. I understand that at the undergrad level and beyond, anyone who might hire you for a cushy job expects a prestigious credential that digital services can't offer, but if we pretend that doesn't exist, what happens then? Could software (have) eat(en) the education world so thoroughly that the way we teach children would be radically different?

For some anecdata, in undergrad, I had to take two algebra classes, and both of those relied heavily on a mixture of hardware (a "clicker" device) and Pearson's testing website. The second one was practically an online course (something my college offered) that I still had to physically show up for (though few of my classmates did).

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