I remember how it was -- JR
The Fight Over Religious Education: Debates between New York state and its Hasidic community about school choice may offer a harbinger of what’s to come nationwide
The debate in New York state surrounding a state law that requires private and religious schools to provide a curriculum that is “substantially equivalent” to that provided in the local public schools first began in 2015. A group called Young Advocates for Fair Education (YAFFED) petitioned education officials to look into what they claimed was the lack of substantial equivalence at 39 Brooklyn yeshivas for boys located in Hasidic or Haredi neighborhoods. Their complaint resonated with many in New York, including the editorial boards of the city’s three major dailies, who wrote in favor of investigating these schools to assure that their students were getting a full secular education alongside their religious studies. It quickly became an issue of national concern.
On March 23, 2023, a trial court in New York invalidated the enforcement mechanism embedded in these regulations, pointing out that the state’s compulsory education law is meant to be enforced by parents, not schools. It found that a family could be deemed in compliance with compulsory education by sending their children to a religious school while also filing a home-schooling plan with their local district indicating how their children would be meeting the requirements of the substantial equivalence law. It remains to be seen if this ruling will be appealed.
Whatever the outcome in New York, the “substantial equivalency” conflict between those advocating for the rights of parents and those opposing public investment in private education is sure to repeat itself in states like Arizona, West Virginia, Florida, and Arkansas, where recently enacted school choice programs will allow religiously inclined parents to place their children in schools that reflect their practices and beliefs—with public money to follow. The stakes of the debate are considerable, with billions of dollars and the deeply held beliefs of millions of Americans hanging in the balance.
The most recent estimate, from 2019, indicates that over 93,000 students in New York City attended schools considered Hasidic and another 47,000 did so in five counties outside of New York City. Parents freely choose and pay tuition to these schools. It is true that some graduates of these schools have been unhappy with the choices made by their parents, as are some current students and parents. While it is hard to know the exact percentages, it seems to be a relative fraction of the Hasidic community that oppose these education systems.
YAFFED, a group of Hasidic students, graduates, and parents in New York state, argues that parents in these communities face reproach if they opt out of these yeshivas. More importantly, YAFFED believes that the schools fail to provide boys with a sufficient education to prepare them for either college or the world of work. As a result, according to YAFFED, poverty and reliance on public assistance is rampant in Hasidic communities.
It is also true that some Hasidic schools do not offer education in secular subjects and that others attempt to provide the bare minimum with support provided through Federal Title I programs for eligible students. They all provide a classical Jewish education that features intensive instruction in Torah studies and a strong focus on Talmud, in which the boys and young men decipher and analyze competing commentaries on the scriptures in Hebrew and Aramaic. This is not the rote memorization of prayers; it is textual analysis of complex writings. Public schools often adopt “critical thinking” as a goal for their students, but many of them do not ground their students in either enough cultural literacy or advanced thinking skills to meet that goal. Among the three Brooklyn yeshivas I visited, only one does not teach any secular subjects, but its Talmudic studies classes evidenced intense discussion of complex questions related to how people should relate to each other and one’s responsibilities to others in various circumstances. That is a good anchor for raising educated, responsible adults.
These schools also maintain extraordinarily high standards of their own. Some of them expect their students to be fluent Hebrew readers by the end of grade one and test them regularly throughout grade two to gauge their proficiency. The state of New York does not test public school students on English reading proficiency until grade three, and the statewide results are middling at best.
The yeshivas that teach students from Yiddish-speaking homes offer more complicated cases, and the shortcomings in their secular programs yield graduates who are not English proficient. Presumably this limits their ability to interact with the larger secular world, to find certain forms of employment, or to pursue higher secular education without remediation, but one does meet adults who came through these schools and who have gone on to law school or other professional training.
It should also be noted that many Jewish day schools in the modern Orthodox and centrist Orthodox traditions feel that they fulfill their religious obligations with their Talmudic studies while also providing their students with a full range of high-level academic instruction in secular studies. Why are the Hasidic schools in question so insistent in limiting secular studies? As a father of children in such a school explained to me “the answer boils down to the idea that these fleeting early years of education, when children are impressionable and sensitive to everything they see, hear, and are taught, should be grounded in a classical, purely Jewish education.” This principle, they explained, is accentuated by the disintegrating state of society at large; Hasidic parents seek to create and foster a solid Jewish religious foundation during these crucial years of schooling before they enter the world. This traditional form of full immersion in Jewish studies has served their community well through many centuries of trials and tribulations in the diaspora. Contrary to the way these communities have been portrayed, multiple schools serve each Hasidic community, so parents are free to choose the level of secular education they desire for their children.
The question for New York’s education officials now is how to best serve these religious communities who are their constituents. A court has ruled that the state cannot shutter schools which don’t provide a substantially equivalent education, but that they can impose fines or threaten prison to parents who are not ensuring that their children are receiving a substantially equivalent education. Are the state and city education agencies really going to impose sanctions on the many parents who are happy with the educational choices that they have freely made? Some schools might be able to document substantial equivalence with changes at the margins, but those changes will not likely satisfy those most opposed to the educational practices of these schools.
Some schools that offer no secular studies, like the one I visited, may become the locus of a case before the Supreme Court, which in 1972 gave Amish communities an exemption to Wisconsin’s compulsory education law, allowing them to opt their children out of high school, citing the uniqueness and self-sufficiency of the Amish community. The Hasidim of today might just rise to that same standard of uniqueness and self-sufficiency.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/fight-over-religious-education
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Nico’s prospects were already looking dicey in the second grade. Raised by his Latina grandmother in a Spanish-speaking home, he was a witty boy whose clowning got him branded as a troublemaker in an Arizona public school outside Phoenix.
But Nico was saved from this downward spiral by an unlikely intervention —a test given to all third graders. Scoring in the 97th percentile, Nico was placed with other gifted kids and challenged academically like never before, providing him desperately needed focus. By fifth grade in 2021, according to Karen Brown, director of gifted services at Paradise Valley Unified School District, the class clown had become a class leader and was elected to the Student Council.
The boy’s turnaround wasn’t a fluke at Paradise Valley. It’s one of a small number of districts nationwide using an innovative approach to organizing classrooms. Elementary students are placed in six different groups based on ability and then are carefully mixed together in classrooms in ways that shrink the huge achievement gaps among them that make teaching so hard.
This orchestration of students allows teachers to tailor instruction so all students are challenged and can advance more quickly. And they typically do.
The model, called schoolwide cluster grouping, is a counterpoint to today’s prevalent ideology on education pushed by social justice advocates. They oppose most forms of ability grouping, from gifted programs to selective schools, arguing that all students should learn together, no matter their wide range of abilities. The mashed-up classroom in their view is the best way to ensure an equal education and avoid locking black and Latino kids into low performing ability tracks, a widespread practice only a few decades ago.
But many teachers say the result of this approach – classrooms where five grade levels of ability or more separate students – makes effective instruction impossible. They liken it to emergency room triage. Higher performing students are typically shortchanged, as teachers trust them to fend for themselves. The upshot is if the students are getting an equal education, it’s often an equally poor one.
Last year, New York City officials bowed to pressure from advocates and ended selective admissions to most of the city’s middle schools. Earlier, Seattle dropped its gifted program of accelerated instruction.
“There’s a backlash. Districts are seeing a problem with underrepresentation in their gifted programs and say, ‘Let’s just get rid of them,’ and that’s a problem,” says Matt Fugate, an academic expert in gifted education who consults with districts. “They should be saying, ‘How do we make the programs more equitable?’”
Paradise Valley and some other districts have done just that. At Paradise Valley, Brown says, test scores have gone up for students in all ability groups since it adopted the model.
What’s more, in a district that’s about one-third Latino, a much larger percentage of kids like Nico are being identified as gifted, which can dramatically improve the trajectory of their education.
“It works because teachers can truly target instruction after we provide that narrowed range in classrooms,” Brown says. “The model plays a key role in allowing us to address the learning of all students.”
The model has taken root in states such as Arizona, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, South Carolina, and Texas, where progressive educators have less influence and where gifted programs get more support.
The Vail School District near Tucson began the program in 2018, and after fifth graders showed improved performance on a cognitive abilities test, officials are expanding it to three more elementary schools, says Christine In-Albon, the director of gifted and advanced learning.
The Trotwood-Madison district in Ohio is aiming for the same kind of academic growth when it debuts the ability grouping program in kindergarten through third grade this fall.
Customized Instruction
The model was first developed by the late Purdue University Professor Marcia Gentry, a prominent scholar on gifted education. She traced the idea back to her own experience of boredom in an easy Michigan high school where she was the valedictorian. Later, as a middle school teacher, she created a gifted program for students who wanted to be challenged.
Then, in pursuing her Ph.D., she developed the hypothesis that all students, not just the gifted, would benefit academically if they were put in ability groups so teachers could customize instruction for them.
Gentry called the model “total school cluster grouping” and tested it. Her 1999 study compared two low-income elementary schools over three years in Michigan. In the school that grouped all students by ability, “a significant increase in achievement test scores … was found” when compared to students in the control school, Gentry and her co-author wrote.
Paradise Valley in 2006 was one of the first districts in the country to adopt the model, albeit a slightly modified version. Dina Brulles, who developed and ran the program at Paradise Valley until last year, is the gifted program coordinator at Arizona State University.
Here’s how it works: Elementary students are evaluated each year for placement in one of six ability groups: Gifted, above average, average, low average, low, and special needs.
Next, classrooms are pieced together, often with students from three groups to reduce their vast achievement gaps. So gifted kids and low performers are not put together. A typical set up: above average, low average and low.
Motivating students is a guiding principle of classroom design: Gifted and above average students are never mixed in classrooms to allow the latter to shine instead of being overshadowed by the brightest minds. The diligent above-average students emerge as role models for lower achievers, a position for which some gifted kids are not well suited.
These mixed classrooms also seek to avoid the stigmatization that arose when schools placed students into easy-to-identify high, medium, and low tracked-classrooms in the 1980s and later. At Paradise Valley, students are not told which ability group they belong to, although some likely figure it out.
Scores Rise at Paradise Valley
The program appealed to Paradise Valley because it’s a cost saver: Districts can address the academic needs of gifted kids, which Arizona and some other states require, without creating a costly stand-alone program and hiring new teachers. Instead, gifted students remain within the regular pool of students as one of six ability groups.
Before beginning the program, Paradise Valley was in a bit of a funk. Many elementary students weren’t achieving the academic growth sought by the district. Gifted students in particular were unchallenged and disengaged in class and barely grew over the school year.
A small group of Paradise Valley principals, eager to try something new, raised their hands to be the first to test the program at their schools. After only a year, they were thrilled to see that test scores in reading and math rose across the board. That prompted the rest of the district’s 30 elementary schools to quickly sign up, Brown, the gifted director, says. Test scores rose in these schools too.
The district wants every student to master a year’s worth of material before moving to the next grade. Now, about 75% of students on average get there, an increase that coincides with schoolwide cluster grouping. “We don’t always see this growth with every student, and when we see a year where we dipped, we go back and fix that,” Brown says.
Paradise Valley also measures itself against other Phoenix area districts with similar student demographics: half white, a third Latino and a third low income. Its passing rates on a 2022 state test, for instance, topped neighboring Peoria Unified by a wide margin: 56% vs. 42% in English, and 48% vs. 36% in math.
Latino students are a significant part of Paradise Valley’s progress. Amid criticism that gifted programs nationwide enroll too few kids from low-income families, the district revamped the way it finds these students as part of its switch to the grouping model.
In the past, the district relied on parents to nominate their kids for testing, which meant the pool was mostly white and Asian. Now teachers are trained to spot behaviors associated with gifted students – they can be impatient with repetitive instruction, dismissive with a roll of their eyes, and intensely perfectionistic – and more Latinos are now being evaluated.
The district also decided to bear the costs of testing all students in one grade each year to find gifted kids who otherwise go unnoticed.
At 23 of Paradise Valley’s 30 elementary schools, there is now equal representation: The percentage of Latinos in gifted clusters mirrors the schools’ overall demographics – a feat that’s hard for most schools to match. Four other schools are closing in on that mark and the remaining three are making progress, Brown says.
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Australia: Shock stats: Rate of high school dropouts reaches 10-year high
Students deserting useless education/indoctrination
The number of Queensland students finishing year 12 has drastically dropped in the past three years, with current rates now below those seen a decade ago.
Experts believe the disruption of the Covid pandemic played a big role in questioning the focus on academic results and a shift towards finding a career earlier.
The latest Australian Bureau of Statistics schools data shows just 82.2 per cent of year 12 students in 2022 – who would have begun high school in year 7 in 2017 - made it to their final year of schooling.
In 2012, 83.7 per cent of the year 12 cohort who commenced year 8 in 2008 – the beginning of high school at that time – made it to their senior year.
That equates to 11,180 fewer students finishing their secondary schooling now compared to a decade ago, with most of those dropping out male.
The height of high school retention peaked in 2019 just before Covid when 91.3 per cent of students remained until year 12.
University of Southern Queensland senior education lecturer Dr Tania Leach said the pandemic likely played a part in retention rates falling away after some improvement.
“It created the notion that they (students) don’t know what is coming, so they may have decided to look at what they loved in that moment as a potential career,” she said.
Dr Leach said the value of vocational education needed to be increased.
“What we have seen in this data is students choosing different pathways,” she said. “At the moment, it could be that our education system is one-size-fits-all due to such a focus on academic and ATAR results. We need a balance and range; one career pathway should not be privileged over another.”
Tertiary offers to school-leavers show a small shift away from the traditional university path. Queensland’s Class of 2012 received about 49,500 QTAC offers during the two major rounds, but Class of 2022 graduates got only about 45,117.
Construction Skills Queensland chief executive Brett Schimming said in the face of a 10-year high work demand in the state, his organisation changed tack in 2019.
“Today’s young people are the Instagram generation … we started to turn the conversation around and invest in new ways of talking about the industry,” he said.
“We now use virtual reality to demonstrate what it is like on a construction site … put the goggles on and you’re driving a high-tower crane, or on the ground as a carpenter.”
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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