I’m happy to do that. What I’m not happy is for the government to be the arbiters.
We're a country of laws, and NY State has an Education Law. As with any law, if you're not happy with it, you can either lobby to change it or break it and deal with the consequences.
The current proposed guidelines were developed after months of meetings with heads of yeshivas and private schools, parents, alumni. They're not something the govt pulled out of their hats, and they allow considerable flexibility for decisions by the yeshiva.
Which yeshivas? And we’re they developing guidelines or forced into negotiations?
There seems to be a misconception that Yaffed dictated these rules, but that's not how it works. Creating the guidelines is NYSED's responsibility. The current law states that students have to get an education that's "substantially equivalent" to that of the public schools, but it doesn't specify exactly what that entails.
The same problem occurred in the 1970s and 80s, when more and more parents wanted to homeschool and some parents were even arrested for failure to provide substantially equivalent education to their children at home. Proponents of homeschooling lobbied for clarification of the law and NYSED put together regulations, asked for community response, and after a lot of back and forth they integrated those responses into the regulations which were eventually codified as part of the law.
They're working on a similar process now, this time to codify how "substantially equivalent" applies to private schools. They began with the curricular guidelines for public schools and modified those to create proposed guidelines that were publicized in 2019 with a request for public comments.
Staff read and summarized the 140,000 public comments, many of which would have been a single letter signed by 10s of thousands of parents, but also including detailed letters from Agudah, PEARLS, Yaffed, and, of course, other private and parochial schools and organizations.
They read those summaries and conducted online meetings with about 500 participants. These included leaders of independent (eg Preparatory, Montessori) and religious schools (Christian, Islamic, Jewish - they don't specify names) and advocates (eg, PEARLS, Yaffed) as well as groups of private school students, parents, and alumni. "In addition, Department staff conducted in-person conversations with religious communities that do not use the internet." Again, that sounds like yeshivas, but they don't specify names.
These people were asked two main questions:
Question 1: What components of your school’s mission and/or program are important to consider as we create a framework for the substantial equivalence determination process? How would you recommend to demonstrate and/or recognize substantial equivalence?
Question 2: How do you suggest the Department move forward to develop a framework for the substantial equivalence determination process? Please tell us how we can make that process as inclusive as possible.
They took the results of those discussions and rewrote the proposed regulations that we were asked to comment on recently.