you forget that the real for sending to an orthodox school is *to reinforce your values. it is not about education*. once you find a group of schools within your religious comfort zone you choose based on education.
so say sociological studies, and if you think about you will recognize the truth of it.
this is why this idea will not be widely received.
in the Orthodox community charter schools, vouchers, et al - will simply not work. there will be too much litigation against it - and someone will have to fund the litigation. Even if the Fed courts change their rulings on this, the NY and NJ Constitutions will have stricter separation of church and state (they already do as is) rendering it moot for most of US Orthodoxy. just like Pell Grants and subsidized loans, throwing government money at the enterprise will only increase tuition - YU's tuition today is 4x what it was two decades ago. that's well beyond inflation. in the first 3-5 years tuition levels will go down by the amount of the voucher but afterwards they will be back at the levels they were before. the money will go into the pockets of the people running the schools.
While I agree with ben bayit, I am curious about one point - was YU's tuition rise much greater than that of other universities?
my guess is probably not. YU still has some degree of fealty to a community of sorts and also is undergraduate tuition involves some aspects of limud hatorah, thus the tuition raises were not as much as in other universities - and YU probably gives need based scholarships on a greater level.
But my point was that throwing government money indiscriminately at private institutions will NOT reduce costs over the long term. YU just went in the same general direction as other private universities did. lo and behold when the Pell Grant formulas were changed last year and a significant amount of college frehsman discovered they would not be able to afford their sophomore year at University - many schools "found" the money to keep them around.
As long as Orthodox Jewry remains part of the general pouplation in the USA and concentrated in blue states there is simply no way to have an effective religious day school that will be based on taxpaper money without running into legal or social problems. the only answer to the tuition crises is Aliyah. I'm sure that 3/4 of the Orthodox Jews on this summers NBN flights are tuition refugees. Some may have some vague sort of notion of Zionism or perhaps even an appreciation of the Mitzvah of Yishuv Haaretz, but most are tuition refugees. I know that my sense of appreciation for mitzvat yishuv haaretz came out well after Aliyah - though I believe that it was always there subconsciously
You don't send your kinds to Jewish schools so that they can learn...you send them there for the environment, the culture. This kind of thing won't ever replace the Orthodox method in place now.
Orthodox schools are about socialization and acculturation, not education.
Anonymous: that was what I was trying to say...after reading the article more closely, however, I think the Florida school would accomplish this. I'm very wary of these solutions only because I attended public school and went to Hebrew school 3 nights a week, and I know how well that did not work. Ultimately the child identifies with the culture he/she is most often ensconced in, and if the public school is the daily culture, you'll have public school kids, not Jewish kids.
socialization, yes. acculturation, no.
schools generally don't deal with the major cultural aspects of jewish life. they generally don't educate about kashrus in any meaningful way (they might learn about hooves and cud, but they won't learn how to run a kosher home), they may teach hilchot shabbat, but they don't teach how to keep shabbat (for the very basic reason that there's no school on shabbat), and they don't touch taharat hamishpacha with a 10 foot pole. these are three cardinal elements of frum culture. there's more to be said, but acamo"l.
what on earth are you talknig about? Orthodox preschoolers make a mock shabbos where the girls light candles and the boys make kiddush, etc. They sing songs about kosher and cover the basic rules of kashrus incessantly. And taharat hamishpacha is not a cardinal element of frum culture. It's not even an element of frum culture at all--it's hidden and private, the very opposite of culture.
They don't get their culture soley from thei schools, but to say that the schools don't acculturate is ridiculous.
And that's not to mention all the other very real aspects of ORthodox culture that are learned from school, often to the parent's dismay.
With all the problems of orthodox day schools, I have to say they are far better than the public schools in the areas where most frum Jews live. (I also think they are better than public schools even in districts with more white students, less crime, less pregnancies, and better academic improvement. But the difference is less pronounced).
None of this to say tuition is not a serious problem. And I agree with Ben Bayit that government money will not help the problem. Freezing adminstration/teacher/rebbeim salaries, if not actually reducing them, would be a major step forward. Naturally you would be publicly villifed, glared at, denunciated from the pulpit, and generally scorned and mocked. But you would be right. ( And privately blessed).
Jacob Emden made an effort to acquire the Latin and Dutch languages, in which, however, he was seriously hindered by his belief that a Jew should occupy himself with secular sciences only during the hour of twilight. This belief stems from the biblical verse (Josh. I:
: "This book of the Torah shall not leave your mouth; you shall meditate therein day and night, in order that you observe to do all that is written in it, for then will you succeed in all your ways and then will you prosper.", leaving room for secular studies during hours which are neither truly day nor truly night.
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Nice how he considers Latin and Dutch secular studuies unlike Chabad which also considers Sefer Yehoshua secular studies.
Please note that there are, or supposedly will be, challenges to this school on First Amendment (gov't support of religion) grounds.
Anonymous at 11:42: I've seen Orthodoxy described as having three major poles: shomer Shabbat, shomer kashrut, and shomer taharat. It may be a private thing, but it is one of the things which marks an Orthodox Jew as Orthodox.
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