{"id":172830,"date":"2026-02-25T14:30:34","date_gmt":"2026-02-25T22:30:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=172830"},"modified":"2026-02-25T14:44:00","modified_gmt":"2026-02-25T22:44:00","slug":"nyt-in-hasidic-enclaves-failing-private-schools-flush-with-public-money","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=172830","title":{"rendered":"NYT: In Hasidic Enclaves, Failing Private Schools Flush With Public Money"},"content":{"rendered":"

The New York Times reported Sep. 11, 2022<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\nThe Hasidic Jewish community has long operated one of New York\u2019s largest private schools on its own terms, resisting any outside scrutiny of how its students are faring.<\/p>\n

But in 2019, the school, the Central United Talmudical Academy, agreed to give state standardized tests in reading and math to more than 1,000 students.<\/p>\n

Every one of them failed.<\/p>\n

Students at nearly a dozen other schools run by the Hasidic community recorded similarly dismal outcomes that year, a pattern that under ordinary circumstances would signal an education system in crisis. But where other schools might be struggling because of underfunding or mismanagement, these schools are different. They are failing by design.<\/p>\n

The leaders of New York\u2019s Hasidic community have built scores of private schools to educate children in Jewish law, prayer and tradition \u2014 and to wall them off from the secular world. Offering little English and math, and virtually no science or history, they drill students relentlessly, sometimes brutally, during hours of religious lessons conducted in Yiddish.<\/p>\n

The result, a New York Times investigation has found, is that generations of children have been systematically denied a basic education, trapping many of them in a cycle of joblessness and dependency.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On June 30, 2023, the New York Times followed up<\/a>: <\/p>\n

Eighteen private schools run by the Hasidic Jewish community have been breaking the law by not providing their students with an adequate secular education, New York City officials said on Friday.<\/p>\n

The findings were an extraordinary rebuke of the schools, known as yeshivas, which receive hundreds of millions of dollars in public money annually but have long resisted outside oversight.<\/p>\n

The determinations about the schools, which offer intensive religious lessons in Yiddish but little instruction in English, math or other secular subjects, marked the first instance of the city concluding that private schools had failed to provide a sufficient education.<\/p>\n

The move was all the more remarkable because it was made by a city government that has shied away from criticizing the politically influential Hasidic community. And it stemmed from a long-stalled investigation that spanned eight years and two mayoral administrations and was often hobbled by political interference and bureaucratic inertia.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Outside looking in: shock, horror, moral outrage<\/strong><\/p>\n

From the outside, this looks like a textbook abuse of power.<\/p>\n

Children are denied basic skills that modern societies treat as non-negotiable. Public money flows with little accountability. Political officials appear captured. Exit stories are bleak and sometimes tragic. Journalists, regulators, and liberal professionals read this through a child-welfare frame and a civic-equality frame. The reaction is visceral. How can this be legal. How can parents allow it. How can a religious group wall off children from the tools needed to survive in the wider world.<\/p>\n

Through an Alliance Theory lens, the outside coalition interprets behavior as betrayal of universalist norms. Education is treated as a neutral good. Individual autonomy is sacred. The state is presumed legitimate when it enforces baseline standards. When those expectations are violated, outsiders default to moral language. Abuse. Neglect. Corruption.<\/p>\n

Inside looking out: existential defense of a bounded alliance<\/strong><\/p>\n

Inside the Hasidic world, the same facts are interpreted through a survival frame. Groups evolve norms not to maximize truth or welfare but to preserve cooperation, loyalty, and reproduction under threat. Hasidic communities are high-boundary, high-fertility, high-coordination alliances formed in the shadow of historical catastrophe. Their overriding goal is continuity across generations.<\/p>\n

From that standpoint, secular education is not neutral. It is an exit ramp. English fluency, college readiness, scientific worldview, and cultural literacy are all bridges to outside alliances that compete directly with the Hasidic one. Teaching them deeply is not a kindness. It is a leak.<\/p>\n

The schools are not failing by accident. They are performing alliance maintenance. They concentrate cognitive effort on texts, norms, and habits that bind boys tightly to the internal network. Economic dependency is not a bug. It increases retention. Political bloc voting is not corruption. It is defensive coordination against a state perceived as hostile or assimilatory.<\/p>\n

Public funding is not seen as hypocrisy. It is viewed as extraction from an external system that already taxes and regulates the community while offering little cultural respect. Taking money without surrendering control feels justified, even virtuous. We pay. We vote. We comply minimally. We survive. <\/p>\n

Hasidic leaders use their followers’ ability to vote as a bloc to protect their schools from government interference. They view the state\u2019s attempts to regulate curriculum as an attack on their religious freedom and their parents’ right to choose how to raise their children. The focus on insular enclaves is a way to recreate a way of life nearly wiped out in the Holocaust. In an environment of growing antisemitic violence, they view their schools as essential for continuity and safety<\/p>\n

Outsiders moralize because they are enforcing universalist norms that stabilize large pluralistic societies. Insiders resist because those same norms dissolve small, thick, high-commitment communities. Each side is rational within its alliance ecology.<\/p>\n

When regulators say education is about opportunity, insiders hear assimilation. When journalists say children deserve choice, insiders hear defection. When politicians hesitate, outsiders see cowardice. Insiders see proof that bloc loyalty still works.<\/p>\n

The most painful casualties are edge cases. Kids who cannot fully internalize the alliance yet lack tools to exit. Parents who privately worry but cannot defect without catastrophic social cost. Reformers branded as traitors because they threaten boundary integrity from within. Alliance systems are always harshest on internal dissent. <\/p>\n

This is not primarily an education story. It is an alliance survival story colliding with a liberal state.<\/p>\n

Outsiders will not fix it with better metrics or louder outrage. Insiders will not change while boundary erosion feels more dangerous than poverty. Any real shift would require either reduced external threat perception or the emergence of a viable internal sub-alliance that can preserve identity while loosening educational controls.<\/p>\n

Until then, shock from the outside and defiance from the inside are not misunderstandings. They are the equilibrium.<\/p>\n

Niche construction sharpens what Alliance Theory already suggests by explaining how this equilibrium becomes stable across generations rather than merely why actors defend it.<\/p>\n

Alliance Theory explains motive. Niche construction explains durability.<\/p>\n

From a niche construction perspective, Hasidic communities are not just defending norms. They are actively engineering an environment that makes alternative strategies costly, unattractive, or unintelligible.<\/p>\n

Education is one lever among many. Language choice. Housing density. Marriage timing. Dress. Gender roles. Media restrictions. Welfare navigation. Bloc politics. Each element reshapes the local environment so that the Hasidic strategy is the path of least resistance inside the niche and a very hard path to exit.<\/p>\n

The school system is central because it sculpts cognition early. Boys are trained intensively in pattern recognition, text parsing, memory, and rule-bound reasoning that are highly adaptive inside the niche. At the same time, they are deprived of skills that would be adaptive outside it. This is not accidental underdevelopment. It is asymmetric adaptation.<\/p>\n

Niche construction adds an important correction to outsider moral language. The system does not merely restrict options. It reorganizes payoffs. A Hasidic man without English, credentials, or cultural fluency is not just disadvantaged in America. He is advantaged within the Hasidic niche because he is more dependent, more predictable, and more tightly embedded.<\/p>\n

This also explains why reform pressure often backfires. External attempts to impose secular standards are interpreted not as neutral improvement but as hostile niche invasion. The more intense the pressure, the more aggressively the niche is reinforced. Smartphones are banned. English use is policed. School boundaries harden. Alliance Theory predicts resistance. Niche construction predicts counter-adaptation.<\/p>\n

It also explains the timing. Earlier generations of Hasidic schools sometimes offered more secular content. As the surrounding environment became more permissive, more seductive, and more exit-friendly, the niche had to become more extreme to remain viable. Increased insulation is a response to increased permeability, not increased confidence. <\/p>\n

Finally, niche construction helps explain why internal suffering does not automatically lead to reform. Evolutionarily speaking, niches do not optimize for individual flourishing. They optimize for persistence. High dropout costs, even tragic ones, can be tolerated if the niche as a whole remains stable and reproduces.<\/p>\n

The uncomfortable implication is this. From inside the system, the schools may be working exactly as intended. From outside the system, they violate core liberal assumptions. Niche construction shows that both can be true at the same time.<\/p>\n

Since the original reporting, enforcement attempts briefly intensified but were rapidly countered by political mobilization, illustrating both Alliance Theory (defensive bloc coordination) and niche construction (counter-adaptation to external threats).<\/p>\n

In early 2025, the New York State Education Department (under Commissioner Betty Rosa) took unprecedented steps: it cut public funding to at least two (and later reports suggest more) Brooklyn Hasidic boys’ yeshivas for failing “substantial equivalency” standards, effectively ordering student transfers by fall 2025 and signaling potential closures. This was the strongest regulatory action yet, tied to 2022 regulations that required private schools to demonstrate roughly equivalent secular instruction or lose aid.<\/p>\n

Hasidic leaders and aligned lawmakers responded aggressively. In the FY2026 state budget (finalized around May 2025), a last-minute provision\u2014often called the “Felder Amendment” expansion or similar carve-out\u2014weakened oversight dramatically. It created new “pathways” for compliance (e.g., alternative assessments, even low-performing ones if participation rates meet thresholds; extended phase-in periods potentially to 2032\u201333). Critics (including Rosa and education advocates) called it a “travesty” and a rollback that makes meaningful enforcement nearly impossible. Hasidic-aligned voices celebrated it as protecting “freedom of education.”<\/p>\n

Courts have split the difference: New York’s highest court (Court of Appeals, June 2025) upheld the state’s authority to regulate and evaluate nonpublic schools but ruled that authorities cannot outright close schools or forcibly remove students for noncompliance\u2014only withhold funding or deem them non-compliant for compulsory-education purposes. A later Supreme Court ruling (September 2025) stayed certain defunding orders by citing the new budget language, allowing affected schools to select alternative compliance paths.
\nAdvocacy groups like YAFFED filed lawsuits (e.g., September 2025 class action) arguing the budget changes violate the state constitution’s guarantee of a sound basic education. Outcomes remain pending, but the pattern holds: regulatory pressure triggers intensified political extraction (bloc voting leverage during budget season), which in turn dilutes enforcement.<\/p>\n

These moves show niche counter-adaptation in real time. When exit threats (funding cuts, potential student relocation) grew tangible in early 2025, the community hardened boundaries further\u2014mobilizing votes, securing legislative carve-outs, and using courts to buy time. Outsider attempts at “better metrics” or “accountability” were reframed as existential attacks, prompting exactly the reinforcement (tighter rules on English use, media bans, etc.) that your niche-construction lens predicts.<\/p>\n

Asymmetric adaptation pays off inside the niche \u2014 Limited secular skills make outside exit genuinely costly (language barriers, credential gaps, social isolation), while dependence on community networks (jobs, welfare navigation, marriage markets) makes staying rewarding or at least safer. Poverty and welfare reliance aren’t bugs; they bind people tighter to internal mutual-aid systems and reduce defection incentives.<\/p>\n

External pressure backfires predictably \u2014 Attempts to impose universal standards are read as niche invasion \u2192 defensive escalation \u2192 successful political extraction \u2192 weakened rules \u2192 temporary reprieve \u2192 perceived proof that bloc coordination works. This feedback loop stabilizes the system generationally.<\/p>\n

The liberal state is structurally disadvantaged \u2014 It must enforce universal norms without appearing to target one group (risking religious-freedom claims), while the Hasidic coalition can openly prioritize particularist survival without similar constraint. Politicians (e.g., repeated gubernatorial deference ahead of elections) calculate that the cost of confrontation outweighs the benefit.<\/p>\n

Edge cases remain the tragedy \u2014 Individuals who sense the mismatch early but face catastrophic exit costs (shunning, family rupture, economic helplessness) suffer most acutely. Reformers inside are branded traitors because they erode boundary integrity. Outsiders moralize about “rights of the child”; insiders see those same rights claims as solvent dissolving group cohesion.<\/p>\n

The 2025\u20132026 developments aren’t a resolution\u2014they’re the system adapting, buying time, and proving resilient. Outsider shock\/outrage and insider defiance aren’t communication failures; they are predicted outputs of two incompatible alliance logics colliding in a pluralistic state. Real change would likely require either a dramatic reduction in perceived external threats (lowering the felt need for insulation) or the slow emergence of a viable internal faction that can preserve core identity while incrementally opening secular windows\u2014neither of which appears imminent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The New York Times reported Sep. 11, 2022: The Hasidic Jewish community has long operated one of New York\u2019s largest private schools on its own terms, resisting any outside scrutiny of how its students are faring. But in 2019, the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,577,616],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-172830","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-hasidim","category-new-york"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t