Going back to the OP, and as my name indicates, I’m talking here about yeshivas outside of Brooklyn. Most of the mainstream yeshivas I’m familiar with do offer secular studies and seem to be taking them increasingly seriously. For example, one mesivta that previously did not offer AP’s now does. The vast majority of the boys did very well on their SAT’s. Regents are only administered in NY State, but they do pretty well on them as well. Many years ago Newsday had an article listing reading and math scores for both public and private schools in the boros and LI. For the most part the scores in the yeshivas beat those of the public schools in their districts. As a secular man who had attended Bronx Science in his youth once said to me, “the yeshivas must have very high academic standards with such a concentration of Jewish kids”. They don’t call us “the people of the book” only because of learning Torah. It is a long part of our tradition to be literate, including centuries when the rest of the world for the most part was not. No ethnic group can say the same except for Asians.
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