A Court’s Recent Ruling on Hasidic Education Raises New Problems

For nearly a decade, the New York State Education Department (NYSED) has been engaged in a struggle with a group of hasidic schools, which it seeks either to shut down or to compel to modify their curricula to teach secular subjects more thoroughly. The last round in this battle occurred in June, when a state appellate court ruled in favor of NYSED’s regulations, while accepting previous rulings that educational requirements apply to parents, not schools themselves. Michael A. Helfand zeroes in on one particular aspect of the ruling: