New York court rules on whether states can force yeshivas to teach secular studies

Yeshivas took New York’s education department to court, hoping to strike down regulations that mandated secular education. The result will revolutionise private schools in the state.

What should happen when a yeshiva does not teach its students the legally required amount of secular studies? And who should be held responsible: the school, or the parents who chose it?

Both of those questions were at the heart of a bombshell ruling in a New York state court last week that, if it stands, will transform how the state can regulate private schools.

 It also poses a challenge to advocates for increased secular education in yeshivas, who have spent years pushing the state to more strictly enforce its standards in schools. 

It’s the latest major development in a years-long battle between an education department that seeks to compel secular education standards across private schools and haredi Orthodox yeshivas resisting coercion from the state.

In a trial that pitted several yeshivas and their advocates against the state’s education department, a judge in Albany ruled that the state no longer has the power to effectively force yeshivas to close for not teaching secular studies in a way that is “substantially equivalent” to education in public school. According to the ruling, state law says it’s the responsibility of parents, not schools, to ensure that children receive a “substantially equivalent” secular education.

Yeshivas and their supporters had taken the department to court, hoping that the judge would fully strike down the regulations that mandated secular education standards. 

Both advocates and critics of the yeshivas are celebrating parts of the ruling and lamenting others. What’s clear is that the state’s mechanism for enforcing secular education standards in private schools will have to change, though what shape it will take remains to be seen. 

“It highlights and it notes that the statute itself requires parents to ensure that their children receive a substantially equivalent education, but it doesn’t impose an obligation on the schools to provide that,” said Michael Helfand, a scholar of religious law and religious liberty at Pepperdine University, explaining the ruling. “If that’s the case, there’s no authority under the statute to close the school because the school failed to provide a ‘substantially equivalent’ education.”