Shulem Deen was raised in an Orthodox home. He wrote an opinion article in the New York Times today about the low quality of education he received in religious schools.

He writes:

”Last Friday, as observant Jews hurried with last-minute preparations for Passover, one Orthodox Jew was in Albany, holding up the New York State budget. He was insisting that this roughly $168 billion package include a special provision that would allow religious schools to meet the state’s educational requirements by using their long hours of religious instruction.

“In recent years, education activists, among them former Hasidic yeshiva graduates, have pushed aggressively to bring the yeshivas into compliance with the state’s education laws. Simcha Felder, the state senator from Brooklyn who represents the heavily ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods of Borough Park and Midwood, was on a mission to get legal permission for the state to turn a blind eye to the near-absence of secular instruction in many yeshivas. The upshot? Tens of thousands of children would continue to graduate without the most basic skills.

“I know about the cost. I was one of those kids.

“I was raised in New York’s Hasidic community and educated in its schools. At my yeshiva elementary school, I received robust instruction in Talmudic discourse and Jewish religious law, but not a word about history, geography, science, literature, art or most other subjects required by New York State law. I received rudimentary instruction in English and arithmetic — an afterthought after a long day of religious studies — but by high school, secular studies were dispensed with altogether.

“The language of instruction was, for the most part, Yiddish. English, our teachers would remind us, was profane…

”When I was in my 20s, already a father of three, I had no marketable skills, despite 18 years of schooling. I could rely only on an ill-paid position as a teacher of religious studies at the local boys’ yeshiva, which required no special training or certification. As our family grew steadily — birth control, or even basic sexual education, wasn’t part of the curriculum — my wife and I struggled, even with food stamps, Medicaid and Section 8 housing vouchers, which are officially factored into the budgets of many of New York’s Hasidic families….

”I now have two sons, ages 16 and 18. I do not have custody of them — I lost it when I left the Hasidic world, and so I have no control over their education. Today, they cannot speak, read or write in English past a second-grade level. (As for my three daughters, their English skills are fine. Girls, not obligated with Torah study, generally receive a decent secular education.)

“Like me, my sons will be expected to marry young and raise large families. They too will receive no guidance on how to provide for them and will be forced into low-wage jobs and rely heavily on government support.

“They are not alone. Across the state, there are dozens of Hasidic yeshivas, with tens of thousands of students — nearly 60,000 in New York City alone — whose education is being atrociously neglected. These schools receive hundreds of millions of dollars in government funding, through federal programs like Title I and Head Start and state programs like Academic Intervention Services and universal pre-K. For New York City’s yeshivas, $120 million comes from the state-funded, city-run Child Care and Development Block Grant subsidy program: nearly a quarter of the allocation to the entire city.”

These are the schools to which Betsy DeVos would supply vouchers. What a shame. The children deserve better education.