Deal on Yeshivas May Have Unintended Consequences

Amid the fevered last hours of New York state budget negotiations on Friday, with lawmakers scrambling to beat the April 1 deadline, a single, seemingly esoteric issue threatened to derail it all: state oversight of religious schools.

Top lawmakers accused one senator, Simcha Felder, of Brooklyn, of essentially holding the $168 billion budget hostage until the state agreed not to interfere with the curriculum at the private Jewish schools known as yeshivas. Some critics have accused the schools, which focus on the study of traditional Jewish texts, of leaving students without a basic command of English, math, history or science.

The drama highlighted Felder’s unique sway in Albany. As a Democrat who caucuses with the Republicans, thus giving them a slim majority in the chamber, he is courted by both parties; both are loath to alienate him or the overwhelmingly Orthodox Jewish population he represents.

And on Saturday, when the final budget passed at 4 a.m., Felder’s influence seemed confirmed. The legislation carved out special standards for schools with especially long school days, bilingual programs and nonprofit status — in effect, yeshivas — in determining whether they offered educations equivalent to those at public schools, as required by law.

“Parents should have the ability to decide what sort of education their children receive,” Felder said in an interview Monday, calling the bill the “beginning of a process that not only pertains to yeshivas but to alternative schools of any sort.”

Assemblywoman Catherine Nolan, a veteran Democrat from Queens who chairs that chamber’s education committee, was blunt about the political calculus behind the yeshiva language. “Even if we had to do something for Simcha,” she said, “we could have minimized the damage to kids with narrowed language.”

But Felder’s victory quickly began to seem less decisive.

While the bill broadened the criteria for evaluating the “substantial equivalency” of the schools’ curriculum to the public school version, it also for the first time granted the state education commissioner explicit authority to evaluate that equivalency — a power previously reserved for individual school districts. Critics have suggested that school officials in New York City have ignored the subpar education at yeshivas because of the Jewish community’s political clout.

“I don’t know if we met Sen. Felder’s demands,” said the Assembly speaker, Carl E. Heastie. “I think we read the bill a different way.”

He added: “It empowers SED,” or the state Education Department.

Differing interpretations aside, the battle has thrust the somewhat arcane world of yeshivas — which teach about 57,000 students in New York City, and which the city has promised for years to investigate — into the spotlight.

“I could never have imagined so much attention,” said Naftuli Moster, a yeshiva graduate who now leads a group advocating for their reform. “We have groups that have never been interested in looking into an issue mostly relevant to nonpublic schools.

“Suddenly, when this holds up a $168 billion budget, they’re taking a closer look,” he said.

The lack of attention is one of Moster’s biggest complaints. In 2015, under Mayor Bill de Blasio, the city Department of Education agreed to investigate the quality of schooling at yeshivas, at the request of Moster’s group, Young Advocates for Fair Education. Moster said that when he graduated from a yeshiva, he had never heard of basic scientific concepts, including the word “molecule.”

Nearly three years later, the results of that investigation have yet to materialize. Toya Holness, a spokeswoman for the city Education Department, said the probe was “ongoing” and there was no timeline for completion. Last September, the department said it had visited six yeshivas; on Monday, Holness said it had visited 15. About three dozen schools were supposed to be investigated.

Moster’s group has accused the city of dragging its feet for political reasons, out of fear of angering the ultra-Orthodox community, which is known to vote as a bloc.

The state Education Department’s new oversight may spur quicker action, as the department has been moving to sharpen the guidelines for evaluating equivalency at private schools. But Emily DeSantis, spokeswoman for the department, was noncommittal about enforcement on Monday, calling the guidance “a work in progress” and emphasizing that local superintendents would still be responsible for the quality of private schools in their districts.

And state officials are no more immune to concerns about alienating Felder and his constituents than their counterparts in the city.

The Byzantine politics of Albany seem poised to give Felder even more power this year. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has announced his intention to help Senate Democrats regain control of the chamber through two special elections and a proposed reunification deal with a group of eight breakaway Democrats, known as the Independent Democratic Conference. But even if that agreement holds, the Democrats will still be one vote short of a majority, unless Felder, too, rejoins the fold — something he has not committed to doing.

At a news conference about the budget on Friday, Cuomo declined to take a stance on the issue of state oversight of yeshivas, saying that it was “very important to the Orthodox Jewish community for good reason, but it’s also important that we have a substantially equivalent education.”

Holness, the spokeswoman for the city’s Education Department, declined to comment on how the revised state guidance would affect the city’s inquiry. But Moster, who said he has raised more than $10,000 to put up a billboard accusing de Blasio of turning a blind eye to yeshivas, said the broadened language should not preclude the city from issuing its findings. “I think the city owes city residents the report regardless,” he said.

And he dismissed the political maneuvers that might be at play.

“I believe our issue is, or should be, the most nonpartisan issue out there,” Moster said. “Kids getting a basic education.”