Susan Edelman, investigative reporter on education issues, reports on emails showing that New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio made a deal with Orthodox Jewish leaders—a powerful voting bloc in the city and state politics—to stall an investigation of shoddy yeshivas in exchange for their support in the state legislature renewing mayoral control of the New York City public schools.
Edelman writes:
Mayor Bill de Blasio was personally involved in a deal with Orthodox Jewish leaders to delay a long-awaited report on shoddy yeshivas in exchange for an extension of mayoral control of city schools, emails obtained by The Post show.
Internal emails among de Blasio and his top aides at City Hall and the Department of Education reveal that the mayor made key phone calls to the powerful religious leaders to clinch the support of two state lawmakers voting on his power to run the nation’s largest school system.
“These internal communications reveal what we suspected all along: Mayor de Blasio abused his power by interfering with the yeshiva investigation,” said Nafuli Moster, founder and executive director of Young Advocates for Fair Education (YAFFED). The group filed complaints against 39 Brooklyn yeshivas in July 2015 for allegedly shortchanging children on secular subjects such as math, English, science and history.
The DOE launched an investigation of the yeshivas, but as it dragged on, critics charged City Hall was delaying the probe to curry favor with the Orthodox Jewish voting bloc.
Even an investigation of the mayor’s suspected interference was stalled, whistle-blowers told The Post. In response to that complaint, the Department of Investigation and the Special Commissioner of Investigation for city schools finally issued a report last December confirming “political horsetrading” on the mayoral control issue.
YAFFED—an organization of former yeshiva students—has lodged complaints against many yeshivas for failing to prepare students to live in modern society while collecting millions of dollars in city and state funding.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Being a southerner, actually dwelling in a border state, Tennessee, I have no knowledge of yeshivas. I had never heard of them before reading this blog. My Jewish cousin who comes to the family reunions seems pretty much like everybody else, and the Jewish kids I went to school with are still good friends. So this is very foreign to me.
I keep trying to understand the difference between these Orthodox communities and the Amish and Mennonite groups who live not far from here. To my knowledge, these groups receive no state money.
I am unaware of any public money that supports religious utopian vision around here. Are there other examples of this happening throughout the nation? This would seem an obvious violation of the separation clause to me.
https://www.oyez.org/cases/2019/18-1195
Roy,
The good news is that yeshivas cannot receive “tuition” money. Unlike charters in NYC, which the DOE is forced to pay something like $16,000 a year to for every student they can recruit, yeshivas get no per pupil money.
However, there are other costs that yeshivas and all private schools can demand — transportation and some other special services to their students.
While I appreciate Susan Edelman’s good reporting, I do wish that once in a while she would turn that reporting to cover the wrongs of those favored by the far right pro-charter privatizers. There is certainly a need to look under the hood of charters like Success Academy — and as Gary Rubinstein’s blog pointed out, a shocking number go students going MIA. Yet Susan Edelman’s newspaper writes genuflecting articles pushing the false narrative that “100% of the students at Success Academy graduate”. Those kinds of articles are exactly why politicians force money from public school budgets and give that money to charters. And the public believes that false narrative. I hope Susan Edelman will also do a story for her newspaper that covers the wrongs of charters, and not just the wrongs of progressive pro-public school Mayors.
de Blasio made a deal that (arguably) benefits those who support his progressive pro-public education agenda and harms the children of parents who (incomprehensibly) actually don’t care if their children are learning anything but Jewish religion subjects. It hurts parents who would rather pay money to a yeshiva that isn’t teaching their children than to take advantage of the free public schools that are available to them that WILL teach their children all of those subjects. This isn’t about “saving” kids whose parents have no options — they could use the public schools AND save money! — but those parents only want their kids to have a religious education and will give up their free public education even if they have to spend their own money.
And this issue is much bigger than de Blasio because it isn’t even clear that he has any power over those yeshivas anyway. And this is not just about NYC, but about yeshivas all over New York
State, which has nothing to do with the NYC Mayor.
It is true that de Blasio made a deal. I’m sorry he made that deal. On the other hand, maybe if he had not made that deal, the right wing pro-charter billionaires would now completely control the NYC public school system, and have directed huge portions of funding to charters while they worked to undermine and destroy public schools in this city so that instead of 10% in charters, now 30% or 40% of the students — or 100% of the students who were least expensive to teach — were now escaping the “failing” public schools the right wing privatizers had destroyed and choosing charters.
Remember that de Blasio made that deal to get a few politicians to join with the PROGRESSIVE, PRO-PUBLIC SCHOOL politicians in Albany! The ones trying to stop the privatization movement!
So one could argue that de Blasio made a deal that benefited the predominately African-American/Latino/economically disadvantaged students in public schools at the expense of ultra religious Jewish students whose parents actually prefer their kids get that bad yeshiva education even though they have to pay for that bad yeshiva education out of their own pocket!
Would NYC public school students be better off if that report on yeshivas had been released a year earlier and the right wing Republicans in Albany got what they wanted and made sure that a pro-public school Mayor got disempowered because he wasn’t charter friendly enough?
I wish that de Blasio could have issued a scathing report about the yeshivas earlier AND continued to govern to protect public schools. I’m not sure if he made the right choice, but I do think that while it would be good for that yeshiva report to be issued much earlier, it could have been very bad for public school students because the billionaire privatizers would have had their way and ended the power of a pro-public school progressive Mayor because he wasn’t charter-friendly enough.