The East Ramapo school district is in terrible trouble. The majority of voters are Orthodox Jews, whose children attend religious schools. The public schools are predominantly African-American and Hispanic. The elected school board is dominated by members of the local Orthodox Jewish majority. They have cut spending for the public schools and are accused of diverting money to private yeshivas. which their children attend.
Currently, a bill is in the Legislature to establish a state monitor to protect the rights of the students in the public schools. There is intensive political pressure to kill the bill.
“A bill that would establish a state monitor for the East Ramapo School District, where a school board dominated by Orthodox Jews has drawn criticism for diverting money from public schools to children in local yeshivas, faces an uncertain future after running into resistance in the New York Legislature…..
“Roughly 9,000 students, the vast majority of them black or Latino, attend public schools in the district, while about 24,000 students who live there attend yeshivas. Because they vote in large numbers, Orthodox Jews have held a majority of board seats in East Ramapo since 2005. Since 2005, the board has made severe cuts to public schools, eliminating 445 positions; reducing full-day kindergarten to a half-day; and dropping half the district’s athletic programs and extracurricular activities, the state investigation found.
During the same period, spending on the transportation of students to private schools has increased sharply, and the district has in some cases paid for special education students to attend private schools when similar services were available in public schools. Parents of public school students have grown distrustful of the board, whose meetings have at times devolved into shouting matches between members and the public.”
The Board of Regents should step in to protect the students.
I am generally opposed to state takeovers, as in Newark, where the state has been in control for 20 years. State control is not a way to improve schools. But when the local board is not acting in the best interest of children, as in East Ramapo, action is necessary.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Isn’t this situation why Cuomo wants vouchers for religious schools and Tisch is all agog over it? One hand washes the other.
If only “religious” people would follow the teachings of their respective religions, we’d all be so much better off.
If only the non-orthodox population of east ramapo were as politically involved as the orthodox…..apathy has consequences.
Even if they all voted, they still would be outnumbered if the numbers of children in the yeshivas is any indication of the number of families.
You bet!
this is a travesty. The corruption is stunning!
I live her and im jewish but Secular. As i write in an earlier post, i watched over 48 years as a top school district was shredded. The scholl board is Run by orthodox men in yamulkas who send their kids to yeshivas,
The local politician takes $$$$ from the wealthy orthodox community… And thus, they have utterly destroyrd our schools. Next door, in clakstoen or Ramapo, the public schools thrive. WE must have a state OVERSEER!
New Jersey has some of the same issues in Lakewood. There are more private schools than public. The public schools are failing, the budget for transportation is out of control, and the kids are the ones suffering for all of it.
Yes, Kathy. I immediately thought of Lakewood when I read this. The children left behind are low income and ELL students. Those in power have been shameless and Teachers and families feel powerless.
At the Regent Meeting Regents Tisch and Johnson asked the NYSED Counsel whether the Regents had the authority to assign a monitor under current law or under the new receivership law, he answered no. As you mention there is a current bill that is unlikely to pass – I wonder whether there have complaints filed with the Civil Rights Division of the US Department of Education?
East Ramapo schools and some Orthodox groups have a tumultuous relationship. In this case democracy has worked against the school district. East Ramapo has seen a huge increase in the number of Haisidic residents. The vote as a block and control the school board. A friend of mine, a brilliant, dedicated, honest man, was superintendent here a few years ago. He was dismissed, and a puppet was chosen to replace him. The board then proceeded to dismantle programs, fire staff, and shift money around to private schools. More will come out, I am sure, if they do a complete audit. For now, it is the mostly poor minority and immigrant students that are the victims in this sad situation. Would charter schools be better? I doubt it, especially the cheap type, but they probably wouldn’t be worse. By the way, Lower Hudson Valley Regent, Judith Johnson, lives in the East Ramapo school district.
A charter school wouldn’t help much in this situation because they get tuition based on a percentage of what the local district spends. So, if the Board is cutting the local budget, the charter would get less as well. It would only help to the degree that the charter could offer more programs for the a lower cost.
ALL CHILDREN SHOULD MATTER!
As someone who has lived through a control board (for the entire city of Buffalo), it’s hard to get rid of state oversight once they enter the picture and their decisions are often counter to the best interests of the individuals who supposedly need their services. In this case, I’m sure there is more to the story than the information we have been presented (there always is) and I would encourage the Board in East Ramapo to revisit the issues in dispute.
Selfishly, I don’t want NYS to get in the habit of interfering with local school boards. After all, I live in Buffalo, NY where we have Paladino and Company creating disasters with their domineering attitudes. I know all about contentious Board Meetings. Yet a takeover by the Mayor or the State would create complete chaos. Please East Rampado, don’t allow yourselves to set a precedent which threatens all the districts in our state.
Ellen #SearchingForCommonSenseSolutionsToImpossibleSituations
Maybe Eva Moskowitz will come galloping to the rescue (irony intended) of the public school children with her Success Academies, and then she’ll go after the public money that is being diverted to the private yeshivas.
I’ve read that religious schools are also suffering from the corporate Charter industry’s hostile takeover of public education.
For instance, “charter schools,” says Father Ronald Nuzzi, director of the Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE) leadership program at Notre Dame, “are one of the biggest threats to Catholic schools in the inner city, hands down. How do you compete with an alternative that doesn’t cost anything?”
Ron Zimmer, of the RAND Corporation, and two colleagues studied the impact of charters in Michigan, one of the most chartered states in the nation, and determined that private schools were taking as big a hit as traditional public schools because of charters. “Private schools will lose one student for every three students gained in the charter schools,” they wrote. This had, they said, “not only…a statistically significant effect on private schools but an effect that is economically meaningful.”
http://educationnext.org/can-catholic-schools-be-saved/
Eva would not find the poor Haitians and Latinos to her liking, and East Ramapo has many ELLs.
Ah yes, but Eva is clever and would get in claiming she would be saving the most at risk kids you mention, and then she’d go after the Jewish children in the religoius schools.
She wouldn’t get them. These Jews would find anything non-religious too secular. They are the most conservative group you can find. They are an island unto themselves. They barely interact with the larger community.
Lloyd Lofthouse: valuable info.
Thank you for bringing this to our attention.
😎
This is the first I have read on the charter influence in private schools. Thanks!
Yes, one effect of charters is that many students have moved from parochial schools to charters. Those families give up any aspect of religion in school, and have to follow state testing requirements, etc.
But, I don’t see this as unfair; these parents mostly had their children in parochial schools because they liked the higher emphasis on good behavior. Why should they have to pay for that?
“Why should they have to pay for that?” I think you are talking about kids being held to better behavior.
The democratic process created the public schools they way they are today. A lot of that process has been gamed by the Walton family, the Bill Gates Cabal, the Koch brothers and hedge fund oligarchs who manipulated the public schools through the democratic process by spending lots of money to fool a lot of fools to underfund the public schools and overburden them with rules and testing that hamper a teacher’s ablity to control the behavior of children who are often told they don’t have to do what the teacher says if they don’t like it.
I taught for thirty years and I can tell you first hand that I held the behavior of my students to a high level, but without support from every parent—-something the public schools can’t demand like corporate Charters can—the best we can do is suspend unruly children from our classrooms so we can teach those who cooperate. And most of the teachers I knew did the same thing.
If children refused to cooperate in my classroom, it wasn’t the teacher’s fault. It was the parents and those same parents are not going to put their kids in parochial schools or Charter schools until there is no choice because all the public schools are gone.
Then the next step is an autocratic, non-democratic process to smash a problem that is being ignored.
The corporate school reform movement being driven by the likes of idiots and fools like Bill Gates isn’t about improving the schools. It’s about separating well behaved children and removing them from those children who don’t behave well. It is all about segregation.
Instead of having a quality, national pre-school program designed to foster a love of reading and intervene with high risk children who come from mostly poverty and dysfunctional homes, we ignore the problem and shove those children into the school to prison pipeline—-and this explains why our wonderful (and I’m being sarcastic using the word wonderful) democratic country has the largest prison population in the world behind Communist China (and autocratic Russia) that has more than four times our population.
Instead of dealing with the problems caused by poverty and dysfunction, we shoved those children into prisons and lock them away where we don’t have to deal with them.
Well, I agree that it is a tragedy that we have way too many children from low income families who end up in jail, and certainly the anti-tax crowd like Kochs are very complicit in the gradual deterioration of public services.
I disagree 100% about Gates and reform though, seeing it as part of the solution, not part of the problem. Where does Gates ask for less money for public schools? Gates is studying teaching and learning, and has provided huge amounts of philanthropy to both school districts and others working in the field.
I think overtesting and overprescription of education details are happening because of educational bureaucracies that have failed to keep up with students’ needs.
There are plenty of schools where teachers and administrators do not cooperatively and consistently apply discipline for students. There is plenty to improve without waiting for parents to somehow become better parents or for poverty and income equality to be solved. We have children to work with right now and need to be doing the best we can by them.
As for “separating well behaved children and removing them from those children who don’t behave well. It is all about segregation.”, tell me how that is different from people of means moving to the suburbs for the same reason. At least charters are giving low-income parents the same options that those that can afford to move have for their children.
It is obvious, John, that you haven’t read much about the damage Bill Gates has done with his venture philanthropy so I will ignore your ignorant defense of this so-called, alleged well meaning idiot, Bill Gates. I think you should read Anthony Cody’s “The Educator And the Oligarch: A Teacher Challenges the Gates Foundation” to educate yourself in what is really happening.
Another book would be “A Chronicle of Echoes: Who’s Who in the Implosion of American Public Education” by Mercedes Schneider.
One thing I do credit Bill Gates for is having a great spin (PR) machine to make him look like a saint and hide his forked tail and horns.
You also said, “At least charters are giving low-income parents the same options that those that can afford to move have for their children.”
Sorry, but that BS is trite now. When the public schools are forced to be closed and replaced with Corporate Charters, then there is no choice. Just ask the parents in New Orleans and in other cities that have lost their transparent, public, non-profit, democratic schools, who wanted to keep them.
“But not everyone is pleased with the so-called transformation of the city’s schools.
“New Orleans resident Karran Harper Royal has been a public school parent since 1991 and works as a parent advocate to help parents navigate the charter schools in the city.
“Before the state took over the public schools, Royal’s son went to a high-performing magnet school — a public school with specialized courses or curriculum — and Royal was happy with the education her son was receiving. Now her son is a senior in a New Orleans charter school, and she is far from satisfied.”
“The whole charter school situation has been problematic,” she said. “I feel like it has really been forced on us in New Orleans because they’ve closed all our neighborhood schools.”
She told Al Jazeera that while it may seem that charter schools are making a major impact on the quality of education in New Orleans, it’s little more than a sleight of hand.
Like many people, Royal says the reason charter schools seem to be performing so well is that the state is using a different, lower standard to measure their achievement, making it easier for schools to go from failing to successful.
“You can’t see past the propaganda on charter schools if you’re not in New Orleans,” she says. “I just ask people to look past the data because the data has been manipulated.”
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/4/4/new-orleans-charterschoolseducationreformracesegregation.html
I’ve read both books, Lloyd. I don’t buy the conspiracy theories. I also think that NOLA schools are in *much* better shape than they were pre-flood. I know a lot of these people, and I can tell you that they have the best interests of students in mind. They may differ with some regarding the solutions, but the whole privatization and “corporate” charter thing doesn’t fly with me. There are some supporters of charters that believe in privatization, but the majority see independent not-for-profit schools as a solution for kids and consider that of greater weight than the effect those schools have on adults.
FWIW, I don’t support for-profit charters or management companies, and I don’t think charters should be able to get above, say 50% of the student population without significantly changing policies regarding backfilling, etc. so that they more resemble neighborhood schools. That is happening in NOLA and Camden.
What conspiracy theories? This isn’t a conspiracy or a theory. It is an agenda. A planned agenda and the evidence that it has been going on for decades is a tsanumi for anyone who pays attention. In fact, there are probably several agendas as play here.
“A few billion dollars in private foundation money, strategically invested every year for a decade, has sufficed to define the national debate on education; sustain a crusade for a set of mostly ill-conceived reforms; and determine public policy at the local, state, and national levels. In the domain of venture philanthropy—where donors decide what social transformation they want to engineer and then design and fund projects to implement their vision—investing in education yields great bang for the buck.”
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/got-dough-how-billionaires-rule-our-schools
It takes some outside force to get a non-accountable bureaucracy of entrenched adult interests to change anything, or even acknowledge a need for change.
I read that article, don’t disagree with most of the facts, but support many of the initiatives. Do you think it’s a bad idea to collect longitudinal data so that we understand how students do over time? Do you have a replacement for standardized tests that make it possible to tell in some objective manner how one school or one state is doing vs. others or what is an appropriate level of achievement?
Yes, some of the reforms have had perverse affects, in most cases because of the way that the adults in the system have reacted to them. It’s a system that is very resistant to change and where every constituency fears giving an inch for fear of a yard being taken.
I don’t see any need for high stakes tests that compare and rank schools, students, teachers, etc. The countries that have the highest performing public schools, don’t do that.
Any tests should reveal what students learn and where improvements can be made, and that information should be provided to schools and teachers ASAP, so they can plan to meet the needs of the students. If most of the students are strong in some areas and weak in others, curriculum can be adjusted to strengthen the weak areas and maintain the strong areas. We were doing that before the flawed and misleading 1983 A Nation at Risk Report came out. And we continued to assess and adjust after 1983, and the schools were still doing it when I retired in 2005.
I could accept standards if they were used as they are in Finland, a country that has one high stakes test near the end of k – 12 and it isn’t mandatory—if you do not plan to go to college and even Finland doesn’t have 100% of its graduating high school students go to college. In Finland, the standards are somewhat mandatory and the teachers are allowed to select the standards they teach to and there are no scripted, step-by-step lessons provided by a company like Pearson. The teachers are allowed to plan their own lessons.
We already collect longitudinal data with NAEP in a much saner fashion. As soon as you mandate high stakes national testing you warp the the results even if the intentions of the authors were originally innocent. If you are looking for data on individual students, that really needs to be collected at the classroom level. Standardized tests are a poor way to collect data for informing instruction.
Here’s a midrash from a secular Jew to those “religious” Jews, Orthodox and otherwise, who are ready to scrap our time-honored Constitutional protection embodied in the First Amendment’s separation of church and state, for public funding of private religious schools and the consequent defunding of public schools. I welcome their friends in the legislature to read it as well:
“Once there was a gentile who came before Shammai, and said to him: “Convert me on the condition that you teach me the whole Torah while I stand on one foot. Shammai pushed him aside with the measuring stick he was holding. The same fellow came before Hillel, and Hillel converted him, saying: That which is despicable to you, do not do to your fellow, this is the whole Torah, and the rest is commentary, go and learn it.” – Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 31a.
I am disgusted by what is happening in East Ramapo and to our country.
We have similar issues with the diversion of funds to private schools in Borough Park and Midwood, Brooklyn, a heavily Orthodox areas (and NYC in general). In this case it’s politicians, like Councilman David Greenfield and Assemblyman Dov Hikind, who are requesting more and more for private schools, to the detriment of the public schools. David Greenfield recently passed a bill that requires NYC to provide and pay for security for any of the hundreds of private schools who request it. Of course most of the other politicians have gone along with this nonsense to appease the ultra- orthodox voting bloc. One has to wonder, what the cost will come to. The private schools already get busing and garbage pick up, now they are asking for more frequent garbage pick up and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
This is an extreme case of a publicly elected school board not representing the interests of students. It’s appropriate that everyone here take the side of the parents and the students, but ironic that most won’t do the same thing when those parents and students choose a charter school because their publicly elected school board runs schools that aren’t doing right by them.
The practice of diverting funds to yeshivas and stripping down public school programming has also been going on in Lakewood, NJ. The level of financial corruption in which the orthodox school board has engaged is enough to be under investigation. Local politicians are trying to keep the peace, but breaking the law is breaking the law. As of last spring, a state monitor was in the plans.
Diane,
As a Jewish alumni of the East Ramapo district (Spring Valley High School 1989) I fully applaud your efforts and want to contribute in any way to remedy this corruption.
Dan Leopold ^O^
This should NOT be a question of whether one does or does not support democracy. In their wisdom, the founders of this nation understood that to have real democracy, you need a bill of rights so that a democratically elected majority could not infringe on the rights of the minority in their community. Once you throw that out the window, and forget to hold democratically elected officials to this American promise, you are undermining what has made this country great.
When I see how difficult it is to establish democracy in many countries, I see countries without this American tradition. There is no protection of the rights of minorities in those countries, and there is no trust by the minorities that their basic rights will be protected in the “majority does whatever it wants” society.
What happened in East Ramapo is unfortunately a reflection of a creeping cultural disease that may yet ruin this great country of ours. It’s no longer a disagreement as to how to better govern this country. It’s about “I’m in power, I’ve got mine, how can I govern to keep all my power and all my money”. Sure, there are people on both sides of the aisle who are like this, but in my opinion, the entire agenda of the Republican Party has been usurped by people who have forgotten what America is all about.
I’m sorry for that digression. Getting back to East Ramapo — I am no lawyer, but what the school board is doing should be a violation of equal protection under the law, or some other law. And if elected officials are not governing in accordance to the law, the court should be stepping in to tell them no. If the board continues to do so, they should be prosecuted or impeached or whatever steps we take in this country when a governing body disregards the bill of rights.
Very well said, though my guess is that nothing illegal has been done or SED would remove Board members, which they have the power to do.
They can only spend so much on transportation to the yeshivas, so this is more about a duly elected school board not wanting to spend money on public schools because their kids aren’t in those schools. Many school boards have some representation from the “don’t raise my taxes” perspective. Here, they have become a majority.
The issue you raised of protecting the rights of the minority applies even more in racially divided cities where minority schools are under-resourced, or even state-wide in NY where cities don’t get adequate state aid.
I find these parallels fascinating because here it is the traditional majority that is in the minority. In my city, it’s the predominantly black schools that are failing the students that attend them. Part of the reason is resource allocation within the city as driven by the publicly elected school board.
It is a crime what is happened to the East Ramapo school district; I couldn’t find a public school for our child to attend; the local elementary school in my area closed 1 week after I toured it. The grassroots movement in the area is something I have followed for about 8 years now. I 100% agree – the District was destroyed for the interest of 1 group. I read an article in the New York Magazine called Us Versus Them and then listened to a public radio service discussion about what has happened in East Ramapo – what was once the #1 Marching Band in New York state no longer exists; it takes a student entering Freshman Year 6 years to graduate – because there are not enough teachers – it may already be too late. And who got rich, the lawyers hired by the “BOE”. Disgusting.
An interesting insight to the last 25 years in East Ramapo………….http://nymag.com/news/features/east-ramapo-hasidim-2013-4/
Thank you for your advocacy! It is not the Board of Regents that is the hold-up, as they support the bill; it is the Legislature. Please urge Speaker Heastie and Senate Leader Flanagan to support state oversight. http://www.strongeastramapo.org