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US Education Secretary billionaire Betsy DeVos. Credit: Gage Skidmore On Tuesday and Wednesday last week, US Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos made her first official visit to New York City. She declined to visit the nation’s largest public school district and instead toured two Orthodox Jewish schools, the elite Manhattan School for Girls and the Yeshiva Darchei Torah for boys. She also spoke at the Albert E. Smith Foundation, meeting with Cardinal Timothy Dolan and other Catholic dignitaries.
New York yeshivas have been under investigation since 2015 in the wake of allegations that 39 Hasidic schools failed to teach math, science or English and conducted classes only in Yiddish. Young men are restricted to studying only religion after age 13 and allegedly many students struggle to write their names in English upon graduation.
As these schools received millions in government funds, they are required by state law to teach an “equivalent” curriculum to public schools. Such matters did not appear to concern DeVos whose tours provided her an opportunity to “better understand Jewish education” and, more importantly, offer her strongest support yet for public funding of religious and other private schools.
Speaking at the Smith Foundation, DeVos said, “I know there are powerful interests that want to deprive families their God-given freedom” to choose private schools. She failed to point out that the cost of attending the Manhattan School for Girls was $20,000 a year.
DeVos’ tour followed the May 9 Department of Education (DOE) announcement that it would scrap or amend a number of rules, which restrict faith-based entities from federally-administered funding. The DOE said it will review any provisions that “unnecessarily restrict participation by religious entities” or could “eliminate unnecessary burdens” on religious activities. Attorney General Jeff Sessions had already mandated that “religious observance and practice” should be accommodated in all government activity. Abraham Kuyper Billionaire heiress Betsy DeVos is a devotee of neo-Calvinist Dutch theologian and Prime Minister Abraham Kuyper, an ultra-right-wing opponent of the French Revolution. Kuyper responded to the 1903 railway strike by mandating new anti-socialist laws known as “strangling laws,” which forbade striking by public employees and […]