Conflict of Cultures In Public Education

Benjamin Wallace-Wells looks at a battle over a public school system between Hasidic Jews and other members of the community (h/t nc links).  I found this interesting:

There are other problems that are more complicated, embedded more deeply in the way the community has grown, and residents are preoccupied by one in particular: special education. Whenever I spent time with community leaders, we were often interrupted by Hasidim coming up and asking for help on behalf of a disabled child. “A nephew, a grandson, a friend,” says Yehuda Weissmandl, a Hasidic homebuilder who is vice-­president of the East Ramapo School Board. “I hear it every day.” He himself has a niece with a rare, debilitating chromosomal disorder called cri du chat. “It’s French for ‘the cat’s cry,’ ” he told me. “When she was born, she yelped like a little pussycat.”
There are many recessive genetic diseases to which Ashkenazi Jews are prone, biological traces, in a way, of the community’s history of isolation and persecution. No precise epidemiological studies have been done to determine whether Hasidic communities have more genetically disabled children than average, but Yaniv Erlich, who studies the genetics of the ultra-Orthodox at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, points out the obvious: that an isolated and highly procreative community will provide ample opportunities for these traits to express themselves.
For years, the custom among Hasidic parents of severely disabled children was to hide them—“to put them in a home somewhere,” says Feivel Mashinsky, a diamond dealer who runs the Monsey charity Kupath Ezra. When so much depended upon marriage prospects, a disabled child was a bad advertisement for his siblings, and a source of shame. But over the past generation, that has changed dramatically.

I would expect there might be similar developmental disability issues amongst the Amish.  The whole article is fascinating, including a claim that the per capita income in one Hasidic group is $6570 (they do have very large families).