Victory of Yeshivas in Court Opens an Avenue for Legislative Relief for Religious Families

New York’s Orthodox Jewish schools, or yeshivas, won a major victory in court last week. However, fully resolving the issues raised in the lawsuit will require legislative intervention.

Under pressure from a string of hostile and error-ridden stories in the New York Times and a campaign backed by the teachers union boss, Randi Weingarten, New York state has attempted to revive a century-old, largely dormant law that required students who enroll in private schools to be given an education that is “substantially equivalent” to that provided by New York’s public schools.

Last year the state issued new regulations to enforce this old statute, requiring inspections of nonpublic schools unless they were exempt due to their accreditation or participation in the state test. If the inspectors deem that private schools do not adequately cover the 18 subjects listed in state law, the state could require parents to unenroll their children and force the schools to close.

The state’s chasidic yeshivas were just about the only schools not covered by an exemption and would be subject to inspections and closure. In last week’s court decision, the judge stuck down the central part of the state’s effort to crack down on the yeshivas. The ruling forbids the state from closing private schools that failed inspections.

Judge Christina Ryba’s ruling noted that the law “places the burden for ensuring a child’s education squarely on the parent, not the school….” Parents can ensure that their children receive an education meeting all criteria of the compulsory education law, even if the school they choose does not.

Even if private schools do not cover everything required by substantial equivalence, Judge Ryba wrote, “parents should be permitted to supplement the education that their children receive at a nonpublic school” to be in full compliance, “such as by providing supplemental home instruction.”

Effectively, New York’s Compulsory Education Law treats everyone enrolled in noncompliant private schools as if they are hybrid homeschoolers who can cobble together their education from a combination of private school instruction and outside-of-school activities.

If the state wants to continue with its inspection regime and declare a number of yeshivas deficient, it will turn tens of thousands of private school students into hybrid homeschoolers, who will then have to complete various forms to describe how they are supplementing their private school instruction to comply with the compulsory education statute.

This will be a burden on those families, but it will be an even bigger burden on the state. Not only will state employees have to process and review all of these forms, they will then have to select which among the tens of thousands of families to investigate and — if found deficient after multiple rounds of remediation and appeals — which to sanction.

This will be a huge strain on state resources. Also it is certain to raise constitutional issues of discrimination and arbitrariness in selective enforcement that the judge ruled were “not yet ripe” in her decision last week.

There is an elegant solution that extracts the state of New York from this mess: Revise the Compulsory Education Law to redefine what constitutes an education.

Currently, the law contains a highly prescriptive list of 18 subjects and other requirements, including instruction in highway safety and traffic regulations, arson prevention, CPR, sex ed, patriotism, and “the history, meaning, significance and effect of … the Constitution of the State of New York and amendments thereto.”

However, the statute fails to appreciate the educational value of a yeshiva education, which, as Professor Moshe Krakowski has described, “more closely resemble[s] upper-level humanities coursework in a university than clerical training or contemplation of the Divine.”

New York would be better served by adopting a broad definition of education, similar to other states, that would properly distinguish between the traditional, if atypical, approaches that yeshivas have been using for hundreds of years and real truants who are not being educated at all.

The yeshiva victory in court has fended off the prospect of the state closing their schools, but leaves the state — and families — facing an enforcement nightmare. Fortunately, the problem can be solved with a modest and entirely reasonable legislative fix.

https://www.nysun.com/article/victory-of-yeshivas-in-court-opens-an-avenue-for-legislative-relief-for-religious-families

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Another COVID Fail: School Budget Cliffs With Gaping Holes

Although the funds were nonrecurring, the nation’s largest school district used some of the money for enduring budget items and programs, including hiring 500 social workers, opening new bilingual programs, and expanding summer learning centers.

Now, the district faces a “fiscal cliff,” a situation in which spending creates budgetary needs in the future after a financial windfall is depleted.

“I am … deeply concerned about how the [New York City Department of Education] will sustain many long-term program expansions, which rely heavily on federal relief funds,” Rita Joseph, a New York City Council Member and the chair of the council's Education Committee, told her colleagues in November.

New York is joined by numerous other school systems that used the temporary funds to beef up staff. Some are already handing out pink slips.

In Stockton, Calif., the district is laying off 19 full-time employees hired with part of the $241 million the school district received in COVID relief. The district acknowledged that some of the money, which funded a total of 163 positions, was misspent.

Seattle schools received $145 million in relief and is handing out pink slips to up to 70 employees as it struggles with enrollment that has dropped 16% since 2020. Relief spending included $1.4 million on “equity work” and “response to racism.”

The district acknowledged its economic mismanagement in a public notice explaining its $131 million deficit: “Enrollment has decreased … while staff has increased.”

The fiscal cliff did not come out of the blue, as districts were warned of the challenges they would face in sustaining longer-term programs after the federal tranche was exhausted.

K-12 education last faced widespread financial trouble in 2009, as the Great Recession prompted government to provide nearly $50 billion in relief to districts, which reacted in a way similar to now. Layoffs and budget problems soon followed hiring and expansion.

“Districts are optimistic that something will happen that will not force them into making hard decisions,” said Chad Aldeman, a school finance pundit and founder of readnotguess.com, a reading instruction website. “They see labor costs as fixed, so they don’t do a good job of scaling up or down. They have a hard time downsizing.”

A recent Rand study found that 77% of school districts used the federal money on exactly what numerous other fiscal hawks cautioned against: beefing up staffing with little regard for the future. “Roughly half of district leaders see a fiscal cliff looming after coronavirus disease (COVID-19) federal aid expires,” Rand researchers reported. The study noted that over three-quarters of public school districts have “increased their number of teaching and non-teaching staff above pre-pandemic levels.”

As in Seattle, districts across the U.S. are realizing that they made a mistake. The jobs of teachers, mid-level administrators, and low-level employees alike are on the chopping block. Also in danger are after-school programs, tutoring, and counseling, all aimed at addressing the damage caused by widespread school closures, typically locked down under strong pressure from teacher unions.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2023/04/04/another_covid_fail_school_fiscal_cliffs_with_gaping_holes_891371.html

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Hamline University president will RETIRE after Prophet Muhammad controversy where art professor who showed image in class was fired

The president of Hamline University will retire months after a scandal involving a professor who showed images of the Prophet Muhammad in an art history class.

President Fayneese Miller initially defended the small school in Minnesota's decision not to renew the contract of adjunct professor Erika Lopez Prater who had shown students the Muslim prophet - after providing them with a warning.

But the school finally backtracked after widespread criticism and a lawsuit filed by the professor.

Previously, leaders at Hamline said 71 of 92 faculty members who attended a meeting in January voted to call on Miller to resign immediately.

They said they had lost faith in Miller because of her handling of an objection lodged by a Muslim student who said seeing the artwork violated her religious beliefs.

The Monday email announcing Dr. Miller's 2024 retirement did not make mention of the controversy.

'Hamline is forever grateful for Dr. Miller's tireless and dedicated service,' wrote Ellen Watters, the chairwoman of the university's board of trustees, who also called Miller's tenure' innovative and transformational.'

In October, adjunct professor Prater showed an online class an image of the Prophet Muhammad as part of an art history class.

She warned the students watching virtually what she planned to do, and gave them ample warning to look away from the image if they were so inclined.

In some - but not all - Islamic sects, it is forbidden to look at the image of the prophet.

After the class, Aram Wedatalla - a student who is also the president of the university's Muslim association - complained.

Wedatalla, who spearheaded the campaign to get Lopez Prater fired, chose to remain online in the class.

Afterward, she and others promptly complained to school officials that the image 'blindsided' her and made her feel marginalized.

'I'm 23 years old. I have never once seen an image of the prophet,' she said in a conference streamed live on CAIR-MN's Facebook page, adding that she felt marginalized.

'It just breaks my heart that I have to stand here to tell people that something is Islamophobic and something actually hurts all of us, not only me.'

Prater, who'd been hired that semester for the first time and was due to return for the spring semester, was shown the door.

The university, bending to the demands of the Muslim association, called the incident 'Islamophobic'.

It sparked uproar among other Muslims and professors across the country, who said the school had stifled academic freedom.

One Muslim professor accused the school of advancing an 'extreme' Islamist view that is only held by a small number of people.

The school dug its heels in initially, saying it wanted to protect its Muslim students and make them feel heard before eventually retracting a statement that labeled Prater's actions Islamophobic.

When Prater broke her silence, she said: 'In my syllabus, I did note that I would be showing both representational and non representational images of holy figures such as the Prophet Muhammad and Jesus Christ and Buddha.

'Of course, in an art history classroom, images are the primary source documents that we use as evidence in order to learn about diverse cultures and thinking and attitudes.

'I spent a couple minutes explaining to students, before I showed the images. I told my students if they didn't feel comfortable engaging visually, they were free to do what made most sense to them.

'I tried to empower them to walk away from the video portion of the online classroom, or do what kind of made most sense to them.

'I'm not a mind reader. My discussion in my class was fact based and on explaining the beginnings of Islam itself.

'All of the images that I used were very respectful, they were meant to be instructional and also referential in their original historical contexts.'

Professor Prater added that the student said her warnings 'didn't matter.'

'She had some pretty strong feelings that she expressed to me. But one of them that perhaps gets to the heart of the matter was she thought the warnings that I had provided to the class didn't even matter, because she believed that images of the Prophet Muhammad should never be shown full stop.'

In her lawsuit, Prater alleged that Hamline subjected her to religious discrimination and defamation, and damaged her professional and personal reputation.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11938941/Hamline-University-president-RETIRE-Prophet-Muhammad-controversy.html

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