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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.
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.
It keeps on saying "public money" but what does this actually mean?
Finally I find it
The details are vague, I expect on purpose. The NYT can surely clear this up but are not so they deserve no bonus points for confusion.
It feels like the government wants to make sure kids have enough to eat, so they pay schools money to do stuff like free school breakfast. And we call this "public funding."
The schools serving the very poorest children will simultaneously have the most "public funding" as well as the worst scores.
At that point the article should never have been written.
Of course not. Americans are free to elect pro wrestlers or turn their libraries into sleeping quarters for the homeless, but the stated purpose of the library is still providing access to books. And feeding children isn't the point of education. Education is, i.e. ensuring at the minimum that children learn basic skills needed to navigate the broader society (like, literally read signs, understand arithmetic, handle elementary instructions, speak the common tongue – do things only a foreign premodern peasant thrown into the middle of Manhattan won't be able to). This is a very low bar and, if the NYT is to be trusted (which I guess they can be, here – authors seem to be sincerely distressed with the kneecapped condition of their kin), it is not reached, leaving kids helpless and forced to depend on the unaccountable and overbearing religious community.
So the outrage is legitimate: this is defrauding the state.
This is a more complicated issue than it might appear.
American schools serve a complicated role as an educator, babysitter, and social service.
Some of that falls under “necessary skills” in terms of socialization and, in theory, physical fitness. Other parts are more vaguely prosocial, keeping children at desks instead of selling hypothetical drugs. And there is a surprisingly broad category of benefits to parents, especially if they are not part of a traditional household. The single mother or the dual-income couple is better able to participate in the economy.
Feeding children is mainly in the middle category, It is a reasonably means tested and selective way to keep the poorest from starving. But it also helps compensate for poor or overcrowded households, reducing their food costs. And, even more tenuously, the program is supposed to maintain nutrition with obvious benefits to society.
So, even though it is barely coupled to the creation of educated citizens, school food programs serve a number of widely accepted social roles.
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