Regents approve regulations on substantial equivalency

On Board Online • September 19, 2022

By Cathy Woodruff
Senior Writer

The Board of Regents has approved regulations designed to ensure that New York students attending private schools, including both religious and secular institutions, receive educations that are at least "substantially equivalent" to those provided in public schools, as required by state law.

Local school districts will continue to have a primary role in assessing substantial equivalency under the regulations, which take effect Sept. 28. Previously, state directives to school districts on substantial equivalency were in the form of guidance and had been challenged in court.

In many cases, local school districts will have a mandatory role in assessing whether non-public schools within their boundaries comply with state law and requirements. But the regulations also outline several other "pathways" available for nonpublic schools to show that they meet required criteria that do not require a local assessment. Those include: accreditation by an SED-approved accreditor, registration by the Board of Regents, participation in the International Baccalaureate program, offering of U.S. government-approved instruction on a military base or regular demonstration of grade-level progress on SED-approved tests.

Local school districts will be required to submit a list of all non-public schools within their boundaries each year by Sept. 1, starting in 2023.

Neither state law nor the regulations require that private schools follow specific curricula or that their instructional programs exactly match those of public schools. But the regulations do set out expectations for non-public schools to adequately prepare students to pursue academic or career options after high school.

The standards include instruction in state-required subjects including English language arts, math, science and social studies. They also require that such subjects be taught in English and by a competent teacher.

The Regents approved the regulations at their September meeting amid strenuous objections from advocates for private Yeshiva schools operating in Hasidic Jewish communities.

While New York's substantial equivalency requirement has been in law for more than a century, the issue of its enforcement erupted in 2015, when parents and former Yeshiva teachers and students filed a complaint with the New York City Department of Education. Former Yeshiva students also began coming forward to say they were insufficiently prepared by their schooling.

That criticism continues today. The New York Times recently quoted Moishy Klein, who recently left the Hassidic community because of his dissatisfaction with the education he received. "It's crazy that I'm 20 years old [and] I don't know any higher order math, never learned any science," he told the Times. After a year-long investigation of Yeshivas, the Times concluded in a Sept. 11 article that "generations of children have been systematically denied a basic education, trapping many of them in a cycle of joblessness and dependency." The Times' research included interviewing more than 275 people, translating dozens of Yiddish-language documents and analyzing millions of rows of data on private schools in the Hasidic Jewish community.

Leaders of some of the schools maintain that secular education is not necessary and say their students are, instead, better served by rigorous study of religious texts. A Queens rabbi told the Times Union: "There is a viable, working community . The fact that they're failing math is not indicative of a problem."

The rabbi was part of a protest outside of the state Education Building as the Regents met. Protesters carried signs saying, "We will sit in jail rather than change our childrens (sic) education" and "No changes. No compromises. Torah education will ever remain."

SED has received more than 350,000 comments on the regulatory provisions since they were proposed in March. Included in those were "tens of thousands" of comments that argued that the regulations were unnecessary because Yeshivas "do a good job, have successful graduates, and/or that their religious community has less crime, drugs, suicide, incarceration, and unemployment than other communities," according to an SED summary.

"The vast majority of comments expressed philosophical opposition to state regulation of non-public schools," according to another SED summary.

Delegates at NYSSBA's 2020 business meeting passed a resolution that reads: "NYSSBA supports legislation that makes it clear that public school districts are not responsible for assessing the substantial equivalency of education delivered in nonpublic schools."

NYSSBA Executive Director Robert Schneider said, "Although our member school districts have indicated that this should not be a local responsibility, we appreciate that the current version of the proposed regulations promises to be less burdensome than prior versions of the proposed state policy."

Also at their September meeting, the Regents named the state's 2023 Teacher of the Year, New York City chemistry teacher William (Billy) Harris Green, Jr.

In remarks to the Regents, Green described teachers as the "first responders" of society. "We triage every single person of the United States. They come to us first," he said