Joseph:
You are correct. There should be No Child Left Behind. You are stuck in the ideal. There is a different reality on the ground, which displeases me greatly. The Public School system is a system. If a child a cannot attend School #1, he can go to School #2. They are all under a single umbrella, and the responsibility is not the individual school. And that system is taxpayer funded. Not so the yeshivos. Our yeshivos are private enterprises which compete. If a child is not accepted by Yeshiva #1, there is nothing that presses admission to Yeshiva #2. Nothing. No one accepts the responsibility to insure that every child has a yeshiva. No one. Our community has generous people who volunteer time and effort, without remuneration, to place children in yeshivos. While I doubt the common reason for the difficulty is finances, I bet that happens, too. We should never need such services, but sadly we do. The frequent comment from menahalim regarding such a child is, “Why should I accept that tzoroh? Let someone else do it.”
The reality is that we have a culture of very poor families, and that many will suffer the consequences. I am not justifying the rejection of a Jewish child. I am stating that the system of competing yeshivos, that are competing for reputation and the limited amount of funds available is reality. Changing that would be welcome, but that is a fantasy. And I doubt that the intervention of the richest benefactors would accomplish the goal of revamping the “system”.