In Lakewood, New Jersey, The Battle Against Theocratic Education Rages

As the nation becomes less and less religious, a city in New Jersey cuts against the grain

Freedom of Religion is embedded in the First Amendment and has proven a resilient virtue throughout the history of the United States. This idea is supposed to exist in harmony with its complement: Separation of Church and State. Unfortunately, it is this second concept which has proven much harder to enshrine in everyday American life.

But the modern manifestation of resistance to this separation is far from the Bible thumpers of the Reagan Revolution. The job of politically enforcing Evangelical Christianity has fallen on the Republican Party, with the sheer gravity of the Evangelical vote creating its own national level orbit. It is a population that is simply too big to fail.

Arguably the zenith of the Evangelical’s theocratic power came with the overturning of Roe V Wade, when the years of lobbying and intellectual influence condensed to enforce a widely unpopular decision on the country. They have recently been able to grow their own ideological education systems unimpeded. With homeschooling exploding in popularity, the Evangelical movement begins to cloister itself from the outside world.

But even beyond the megachurches and the cul-de-sac lawns, theocratic influence runs rampant with a much greater ferocity. Here, the public education system is not just neglected, but actively strangled. The will of scripture and tradition overpowers the established legal structure, and even the secular must buckle under the weight. Nowhere is this more evident than Lakewood, New Jersey.

I have talked about the city of Lakewood before, it’s a city which has become the de facto capital of Orthodox Judaism in the Western Hemisphere due to explosive population growth. These parents have created a demand for private schools compatible with their religious practices, known as Yeshivas. You might think this would create an environment for public schools to have smaller class sizes and generally less overworked teachers with more to go around. This is not what has happened.

The result of the private theocratic education received by the vast majority of the district’s children has been a completely unprecedented strain on the resources of the public school system in Lakewood.

At time of writing, the metropolitan areas with the highest rate of private school attendance are New Orleans, Seattle, and the Bay Area. These cities all have enrollment rates that range from 20-25%, depending on who’s counting. These schools are either secular institutions, Catholic, or something vaguely in between.

Lakewood, a town of 130,000 people, is not a major metropolitan area, and thus does not get included in these lists. If it was included on these lists, you would definitely notice because the private school enrollment rate in Lakewood is 82%, four times higher than Seattle and San Francisco. One also needs to remember that these schools in Lakewood are more fiercely independent of conventional academic standards than most of the private schools in major cities. This is because vast majority of these schools are Yeshivas, with the remaining minority being a couple unaffiliated day cares and schools for those with special needs. There’s only one school keeping the list technically multicultural by being listed as Catholic, and even then I have my doubts about its Papist bona fides.

To be fair, I would send my son to Catholic Yeshiva

One may wonder how affected the kids in public school are by the Yeshivas. Nothing would seem to preclude coexistence similar to the kind most public school districts are used to. The truth is that the Lakewood Public School District is not at odds with the Yeshivas, it is abused by them. Through various tax loopholes, generous payments, and creative legal interpretations, Lakewood Public School District is being gutted to keep the Yeshiva system growing.

The first way this is done is a method I have already covered somewhat in an earlier piece: buses. Seemingly benign enough, school buses are a historically contentious issue for many reasons. For Lakewood, the problem arises from who this is spent on. You might have already guessed that the majority of these buses do not serve public school students, they serve Yeshiva students. In total, over $25 million is spent on transportation out of the districts total budget of $250 million. My old school district (St. Paul Public Schools) spent about 3% of its budget on transportation, Lakewood spends 10% of its budget on transportation. This has caused severe budgetary issues for the district, as the vast majority of 10% of its budget essentially doesn't benefit them at all. In economic terms, it is a negative externality.

Yeshivas are able to receive this funding because of Everson v. Board of Education, a 1947 Supreme Court case which allowed school districts to fund transportation to religious schools. This compromise was mostly practical, it let school districts alleviate potential logistical headaches that would come from these single schools trying to operate their own transportation systems. An underlying assumption existed that this case was more about the principle of governments giving money to religious institutions than it was about real issues that would arise from the implementation of transportation funding regimes.

Transportation to Yeshivas is an issue that Lakewood Public School District has tried to amend by setting restrictions on which Yeshivas are eligible. But when this was attempted in 2014, parents of Yeshiva students were directed by a local rabbi to clog the streets with their cars if the $4 million cut in the budget was not reversed. The cut was reversed and the protests called off.

But this budget drain doesn’t end once the kids get off the bus, it follows them home as well. One of the less known benefits of this bus system comes when the Yeshiva students never set foot on the bus. The law actually allows parents to forego transportation and instead receive a reimbursement from the state. “Parents of private school kids who opt not to use busing draw an $884 yearly stipend from the state” according to one report. American Orthodox Jewish women have about 4 children on average throughout their lifetimes. What this essentially does is offer parents a hand out on the public school district’s dime. I’m all for giving parents money and child tax credits, but the source of that money being a public school district quickly prevents this from ethical and sustainable.

“Parents of private school kids who opt not to use busing draw an $884 yearly stipend from the state”

A look at some rough data shows the average Lakewood homeowner pays $7,617 in property taxes every year. With an average of 4 kids, this seemingly insignificant bus legislation lets the average parent of Yeshiva students avoid paying almost half of their property taxes, taxes which pay for public schools in the first place. It’s not hard to imagine how this could be used by spiteful parents of private or homeschool students. Legal interpretations like this could be used to drain the resources of struggling school districts across the country in less economically prosperous areas to enrich those that are able to support the upfront cost of private school.

But this is not the only way Lakewood Public School District is wrung for cash. As I alluded to earlier, special education is an often private yet still secular component of the total student body of the district. The additional needs of special education students requires additional funding, but it is funding that is easily intercepted by institutions that use it for often questionable reasons.

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1995, Lakewood, New Jersey.

A special education facility, the School For Children With Hidden Intelligence is opened by 40 year old Rabbi Osher Eisemann. It sought to help unlock the ‘hidden potential’ of children that are otherwise not able to fully function in traditional academic environments. The mission of the school, according to their website, is : “to ensure that every child was provided with the tools and support they needed to discover their true potential”.

2005, Trenton, New Jersey.

The New Jersey Department of Education launches an investigation into Lakewood’s patterns of sending children to private schools. The investigation centers on the School For Children With Hidden Intelligence (SCHI) and turns up some surprising revelations. In its 10 years of operation, SCHI had never admitted a single student of

color, with the majority of students coming from Orthodox families, until that year. In 2005, SCHI admitted a single minority student. White children were also found to be 70% more likely to end up in a full day special education program instead of a half day one.

2014, Trenton, New Jersey.

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