The first in a series by DNAInfo.com on Jewish parochial schools said that federal education officials were frustrated with the city’s lax oversight of funding disbursed to private schools. Members of orthodox Hasidic community said basic secular subjects like English and math are barely taught in their schools, if at all.

It would be unsurprising if this parochial school had a poor academic track record. None of the teachers went to college. All the students speak Yiddish as their first language. The vast majority of the students are extremely poor. Yet for the past decade the principal has coaxed excellence out of both students and teachers.

City lawyers have been arguing for years that letting religious groups rent space in public schools for Sunday worship violates the separation of church and state and could confuse students about the schools’ secular identity. At the same time, the city has increasingly been turning to the religious establishments to rent classroom space – to relieve school overcrowding – a policy that WNYC reports is troubling people on both sides of the church-state divide.

It has been a challenging week for many third- through eighth-grade public school students in New York City, as they have started their days on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday with the federally mandated English Language Arts exams. But as Gotham Schools reported on Wednesday, the week has been especially challenging for some students with special needs.