Hasidic yeshivas, like all private schools in New York, are not required to administer state standardized tests in reading and math, and most do not.
But some Hasidic schools give the exams as a condition of receiving public funding. In 2019, when nearly half of all New York students passed the tests, 99 percent of the thousands of Hasidic boys who took the exams failed, a Times analysis found.
The poor performance could not be easily explained by the community’s poverty or language barriers.
Statewide, the public schools that served only low-income students all scored exponentially higher than the boys’ yeshivas did, the analysis found. The same was true for schools that overwhelmingly enrolled nonnative English speakers.
In the schools that do not administer tests, it has been difficult to measure how much the students are learning. But hundreds of interviews and a review of student work show that those students are struggling, too.
Nearly three dozen current and former teachers across the state’s Hasidic yeshivas said most of the thousands of boys who passed through their classrooms over the years left school without learning to speak English fluently, let alone read or write at grade level.
Another former teacher provided hundreds of pages of work sheets from the past five years that showed that 12-year-olds — in their last year of English instruction — could not spell words like “cold” and “America.” One boy, in response to a prompt about what he liked, wrote: “To cee wen somone pente.”
