By: Zevulun Harris

Will the Nanny State have the final word on educating children at New York City’s private schools?

On May 31, 2019, the New York State Education Department proposed regulations regarding the statutory requirement for substantial equivalency of instruction for students attending nonpublic schools to ensure that all students receive the education to which they are entitled under the law. The proposal would give the city Department of Education oversight of private and parochial school education

Parents forking over major dollars for private schools aren’t happy.

“It’s ludicrous [to think] that the DOE would have the bandwidth, expertise or funding to even do this,” Julie Tucker, whose daughters attend Convent of the Sacred Heart on the Upper East Side and a son at the British International School in Kips Bay, told the New York Post. “Get your house in order before you start to worry about anyone else’s house.”

“While a decades-old statute mandates that all New York schools provide substantial equivalence, the issue reemerged with a vengeance in 2015 after a probe into local yeshivas, which serve close to 60,000 students. Advocates had complained that yeshiva grads had little exposure to non-religious studies and were unprepared for the real world,” according to the Post. “With the new proposal going far beyond yeshivas, private schools — and the families they serve — are worried what could happen to their carefully-curated educational experiences.”

“The regulations lay out instructional ground that private schools must cover at each level of schooling, from math and science to health education and the visual arts to citizenship and the U.S. Constitution,” noted lohud.com this summer. “They are intended to clarify how private schools can comply with state law, which has long required that academic instruction in private schools be substantially equivalent to what’s taught in public schools. But the proposed regulations include possible concessions to religious schools, particularly Hasidic yeshivas, that have faced criticism for offering limited academic instruction to male students who are focused on religious studies.”

Some teachers are also opposed to the state proposal. “For 100 years we’ve always had the status of substantial equivalency,” Kellenberg Principal Brother Kenneth Hoagland told CBS News in August. He said the state’s proposal of oversight of private schools by local public districts unacceptable and a conflict of interest.

“We certainly are obligated to give an equivalent education to the students that come to us and we have succeeded in that,” Hoagland told CBS. “There are many other ways of evaluating.”