New York is Letting Religious Schools Off the Hook

This year, New York’s budget saga made headlines for its historic delays, lack of transparency, and – as usual – its backroom deals. But one aspect remains overlooked.

Copying from the Trump playbook, Governor Hochul cut a deal to loosen regulations that hold New York State’s private schools to an equal educational standard with public schools. As a result, nearly 200,000 students across the state are at risk of not receiving the sound basic education guaranteed to them by New York’s Constitution.

Worse, the governor is giving private school operators public dollars to teach whatever version of reality suits their beliefs. Over time, failing to ensure that all New York kids are educated on civic participation and democratic values will further damage our democracy.

Before this year’s budget fiasco, New York State’s compulsory education law required that students who attend nonpublic schools receive an education that is at least “substantially equivalent” to one provided in public schools. This meant all schools not run by the state’s Department of Education (NYSED) had to teach basic subjects like English, Math, and History, so students can be well-rounded, informed citizens who can participate in society.

This “substantially equivalent” standard has been historically difficult for some ultra-conservative yeshivas – private, Jewish religious schools that receive over $1 billion in government funding – to maintain. In 2015, YAFFED, a group that advocates for raising standards in yeshiva education, filed a complaint with NYSED alleging that 39 yeshivas in Brooklyn did not provide any secular instruction to their students and were not meeting state requirements.

In 2019, more than 1,000 students at one Hasidic yeshiva took state exams in reading and math and all of them failed. That same year, there were nine schools in the state where less than one percent of students tested at grade level; all were yeshivas. While many of these schools perform well by outside measures, some have been found to teach few secular lessons and barely any English classes, focusing instead on Jewish law, religious teachings, and prayer.

This budget deal means New York children can go through seven more years of school before the state determines whether or not they are even learning English.

The YAFFED complaint shook the state’s education landscape and sparked greater scrutiny of the educational practices at yeshivas. But things only got worse for education standards.

Just three years later, state lawmakers created a carve out for schools that are non-profit corporations with extended hours and a bi-lingual program – which primarily means yeshivas. Lawmakers dramatically shifted the responsibility for making “substantial equivalence determinations” from local school districts to the Commissioner of Education. In practice, this change muddled accountability for the schools and allowed education standards in yeshivas to further deteriorate

Then in 2022, a New York Times investigation found that many New York yeshivas were “failing by design” with dozens of schools posting abysmal failure rates on state tests. Shortly after the investigation, NYSED released clear regulations and criteria for determining a school’s compliance with substantial equivalency. The guidance also added penalties for any schools not following the rules, including losing state funding.

The state planned to fully implement these critical regulations this year, and NYSED was even set to publish a report in June identifying schools that are out of compliance. NYSED also made waves by giving notice to families at six yeshivas that refused to engage in the substantial equivalence review process that they needed to find a new school.

New York was about to take a big step towards fixing the grave injustices that have occurred in our state’s schools and help ensure thousands of students get the education they deserve.

But Governor Hochul and the New York State Legislature thwarted all that progress with this year’s budget, which includes a provision that drastically waters down nonpublic schools’ obligations to meet substantial equivalence.

These changes to the law allow for additional “pathways” for schools to show their substantial equivalence. One “assessment pathway” allows the schools to be deemed substantially equivalent using an exam – even if yeshivas’ scores are much worse than the vast majority of other New York schools. It also provides a “phase in” period for schools, giving them until the 2032-2033 to demonstrate substantial equivalence.

This budget deal means New York children can go through seven more years of school before the state determines whether or not they are even learning English.

The Governor and legislature agreed to these changes in secret, without any scrutiny or input from the public—using the budget as a vehicle to hide their unpopular move from debate. When rumors started swirling that the law was going to be changed, NYSED – the state’s leader on education – slammed the deal saying that it was “troubling that such a critical issue might be decided through the budget process rather than through transparent, public debate. This is not policymaking. This is interference.”

Even Catholic and independent schools who previously challenged NYSED’s regulations spoke out against the “closed-door budget deal.” Unsurprisingly, some in the Haredi community applauded the changes.

This saga is emblematic of a primary goal of the Trump administration and extreme conservative activists, who seek to divert public dollars to private schools and put private religious entities in charge of educating the next generation. President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” for example, uses the tax code to provide vouchers for parents to send their children to private, religious schools, an idea first surfaced by Project 2025.

The Trump administration also recently supported an Oklahoma religious school in its application to become a publicly-funded charter school. Luckily, the Supreme Court deadlocked, leaving in place a lower court ruling that blocked it.

We’ve seen the effects of religious school domination in the Hudson Valley’s East Ramapo Central School District. East Ramapo’s school board is controlled by members of the white community who send their children to private schools, predominantly yeshivas, where the quality of education is largely unregulated. The public schools in East Ramapo are chronically under-funded, consistently underperforming, and attended almost entirely by students of color who deserve more from their state.

The latest changes to the law will have devastating long-term consequences for New York’s students. For political points, Governor Hochul and legislative leaders played into the hands of the people undermining democratic values in our country today—those who believe religious doctrine should be the law of the land, and that a proper education is purely subjective.