Acing the Regents exams

Five Towns yeshivas outpace public-school scores

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State Education Commissioner MaryEllen Elia set new regulations in November that require all New York state private schools to offer a total of 36 hours of instruction per week in English, math, science and social studies. Failure to do so could result in the loss of state funding for textbooks, transportation and other items.

Some 115,000 children attend Orthodox Jewish yeshivas across the state, officials said. There have been issues with a few of those institutions — especially in New York City — providing little or no instruction in secular subjects such as English and math. In April, new state legislation gave oversight authority of yeshivas to the State Education Department rather than local education officials.

The Brooklyn-based Jewish Press obtained Regents test scores earlier this month through a Freedom of Information Law request, and the numbers show that yeshiva students in New York, including the Five Towns, are outperforming their peers in public schools.


“Our guidance recognizes that parents have a right to choose nonpublic school for their child,” Elia said in a news release. “We want to ensure that all students receive the education they are entitled to under state education law no matter which school they attend.”

The new rules require that nonpublic middle schools must provide 72 minutes of math each day. They must also provide sample lesson plans; lists of textbooks; samples of daily, weekly, monthly and yearly schedules; and the framework for education in English, math, science and social studies. If a school is not in compliance — school district reviews will begin this school year — government money can be withheld, and students may have to attend another school or be declared truant. All initial reviews are expected to be completed by Dec. 15, 2021. School district officials are required to re-evaluate the private schools every five years.

Midreshet Shalhevet High School, in North Woodmere, and Stella K. Abraham High School for Girls, in Hewlett Bay Park, have average English Language Arts Regents exam scores of 90.2 and 86.9, respectively, while public schools average just 61.8. Hebrew Academy of Five Towns and Rockaway High School students scored 12 percentage points higher than their public-school counterparts. Rambam Mesivta High School in Lawrence was in the top 20 of the highest scoring schools as well.

Rabbi Zev Friedman, the dean at Rambam Mesivta and head of school at Midreshet Shalhevet, said he believes that private-school students are motivated to excel and have parents who provide strong support systems at home. “The interesting thing is that the yeshivas are able to excel on the New York state, Advanced Placement and SAT exams, despite the fact that they have Jewish studies classes in the morning and secular classes in the afternoon,” Friedman said. “If you do the math, you’ll see that the yeshivas are able to produce this course on less than 36 hours of college preparatory studies a week.”

Students at Mesivta Ateres Yaakov, in Lawrence, and the Davis Renov Stahler Yeshiva High School, in Woodmere, averaged 83.2 and 82.1 in Physics Regents exams ahead of the Nassau County public school average of 77.5, and Yeshiva Ketana of Long Island, in Inwood, showed similar results.

Dr. Hillel Broder, general studies principal at Davis Renov Stahler, which, like Stella K. Abraham is part of the Hebrew Academy of Long Beach system, said that he had “full confidence in the excellence of achievement in general studies throughout the HALB system, and in the HALB high schools in particular.”

Friedman said he hoped the motivation for the new guidelines was to benefit all state students, but he thought the changes would limit, if not eliminate, the programs that private schools offer. If the new rules are meant to help ensure educational excellence, he added, then the focus should be on the reason(s) that public-school students are scoring below their private-school peers.

“If private schools taught more math, science, English and social studies than they already do,” Friedman said, “I believe the gap between the scores between public and private schools would further increase, doing nothing to benefit the hundreds of thousands in public schools that should have the opportunity of a better education.”

Have an opinion about the state regulations? Send your letter to the editor to jbessen@liherald.com.