The Left's War on Parenting

Last month, the New York State Education Department made a crucial decision: Commissioner MaryEllen Elia handed authority to local school boards to veto the right for private schools to operate. Those school boards must now determine whether private schools provide an education "substantially equivalent to that received in district public schools." According to Jewish educators Elya Brudny and Yisroel Reisman, "The state government now requires private schools to offer a specific set of classes more comprehensive than what students in public schools must learn." This isn't a problem for Jewish schools alone -- Catholic schools in New York have bucked the legislation, with James Cultrara, executive secretary of the New York Council of Catholic School Superintendents, explaining, "We simply cannot accept a competing school having authority over whether our schools can operate."

Now there's a case to be made that the state has an interest in children learning basic secular studies, and to that end, Cultrara has called for an objective standard for evaluating whether or not schools are properly educating their students. That case is far stronger in a welfare state, in which insufficient education often ends with the public bearing the brunt of such failures.

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