LETTER FROM NEW YORK
The investigation took more than a year, the journalists of the New York Times (NYT) Eliza Shapiro and Brian Rosenthal conducted more than 275 interviews, but they ended up tackling a huge taboo, the Hasidic Jewish schools of the Big Apple. This ultra-Orthodox community of 200,000 members, or 10% of the city’s Jewish population, lives in isolation in certain neighborhoods of Brooklyn and in the Hudson Valley.
And the results of the boys’ schools, more than a hundred enrolling 50,000 students, are catastrophic. The figure fell in 2019, when some establishments agreed to have their students take an assessment test in mathematics and English, in particular to obtain public funding: 99% failed, reveals the NYT.
In the “making of” of their article, published on September 11, Shapiro and Rosenthal explain that students in other private denominational schools have an average success rate equivalent to that of the public (49%, even though they take in very disadvantaged students): 55% in Catholic schools, 71 % among Orthodox, 57% in Islamic establishments, 36% among Seventh-day Adventists. For girls from the Hasidic Jewish community, the test failure rate reached 80%.
“When I was 15, I barely spoke English”
“But where other schools might struggle because of underfunding or mismanagement, these schools are different. They fail because of their concept”blame the NYT. Teaching in these private schools is centered on religion, it lasts most of the day, six days a week except Saturdays. And when the hour and a half devoted to mathematics and English arrives – there are hardly any history or science lessons – it is often already late in the afternoon; the teachers pay little attention to it, especially since learning English means allowing the children to leave the community later. Chaim Fischman, 24, testified in the NYT : “I am the third generation born and raised in New York. And yet, when I was 15, I barely spoke English. »
But, specify the NYT, “For many Hasidics, their schools are successful, but not by the standards set by the outside world. In a community that places religion at the center of daily life, secular education is often seen as unnecessary, even distracting”.
The teachers are often badly paid – sometimes 15 dollars (15 euros) an hour –, speak poor English, in a community which is one of the poorest in New York. Hasidic schools have received more than $1 billion in government aid over the past four years, writes the NYT. However, they perceive “much less per student than public schools”, specifies the daily, but more than the other private schools. Obviously, part of the gap is explained by the poverty of the Hasidic community.
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