“I also wanted to add that I’ve found that for some schools, the number of students that they have classified as special ed is higher than their overall enrollment. Basically I’m trying to square the special ed numbers and the school enrollment numbers.”
So wrote Brian Rosenthal, a New York Times reporter, in an email to the New York State Education Department. The group Parents for Educational and Religious Liberty in Schools, which advocates for yeshivas, obtained a copy of the email.
“That’s right. To support its claim that yeshivas have a high percentage of students receiving services, the Times relied on data that it knew had to be false, because the number of students it claimed were receiving special services was greater than the number of students enrolled in the school,” reported Yeshiva World News.
“The Times wasn’t objectively reporting facts about yeshivas but was pushing its anti-yeshiva narrative,” Rabbi Moshe Dovid Niederman, a member of the PEARLS executive board, told the publication. “Now that they have been exposed, they should do the only decent thing they can do: Issue a public apology to yeshivas and the yeshiva community.”
