Yehoshua Bedrick presenting at the Heritage Foundation, live on cable public affairs network. At the time, he was a policy analyst the Cato Institute

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ith his black hat, suit, and bushy black beard, Yehoshua doesn’t present as a typical think tank analyst, or even a typical resident of Phoenix, where he lives with his wife and family. He grew up in a family that lit candles on Chanukah after reading the brachos off the back of the candle box, and ate matzah and brisket at his grandmother’s house on Pesach (sans the Maxwell House Haggadah). His father Mark a”h was from Nashua, New Hampshire, where there had been a small Jewish community, and by age 25, he had started a furniture store that would grow into the largest furniture retailer in the state.

Yehoshua’s parents chose to raise their three sons in nearby Windham, where the public schools were reputed to be good. But by the time the boys hit their teens, there was no longer a local high school for them. Yehoshua’s parents decided the best option was a nearby Catholic school called Bishop Guertin, run by the Brothers of the Sacred Heart. Ironically enough, Yehoshua received the school’s religious studies award for being “the student who best understands the Christian message presented in the classroom.”

While the Catholic staff was respectful of his Judaism, his position as an outsider provoked a lot of soul-searching. “People would ask me questions about Judaism, but I didn’t know the answers,” he relates. “I spent a lot of time in the Barnes and Noble Judaica section and found an Ask the Rabbi forum online.” During that time, a Chabad rabbi came into his father’s store in search of an armoire to use as an aron kodesh for his shul, and Yehoshua and the rabbi became friendly. Yehoshua decided to give up pork and shellfish, and started fasting on Yom Kippur.

After high school, Yehoshua went to Babson College, his father’s alma mater, to study business. After writing an article for the college newspaper defending Israel against anti-Zionist activity on campus, he was discovered by the local Chabad shaliach, Rabbi Moshe Bleich, who would scour the newspapers to ferret out unaffiliated Jewish neshamos. Yehoshua became a regular Shabbos guest at the Bleich’s, and the rabbi took him along on a Birthright trip.

While in Israel, Yehoshua figured he ought to show respect for the Holy Land by wearing a yarmulke and tzitzis. But on the plane ride home he thought to himself, “Hey, I’m every bit as Jewish in the US as I am in Israel.” He therefore opted to remain “in uniform.” After that, it seemed only consistent to live up to the image he projected, so he applied for the kosher meal plan at college (airline-style rations, his weekly calories supplemented by Shabbos meals at Chabad). After graduation, he spent a summer at the Maayanot yeshivah in Jerusalem, where he realized that it would take much, much more than a summer to learn about Torah.

After returning to his parents’ house, he kashered an oven and bought himself new pots.

“My parents were supportive, but my mom thought it was just a stage, at least at first,” he says. He began working in his father’s business, which had been his original trajectory, but after about six months he felt a strong pull to return to yeshivah. He enrolled in Hadar HaTorah in Crown Heights (“This was the big city after my small-town upbringing”) and from there went to Yeshiva Tiferes Bachurim in Morristown.

Yehoshua, who had already made some local waves as a vocal advocate for school vouchers while in university, was studying in yeshivah in 2006 when he received a call from a New Hampshire state legislator. “We’d like you to run for the legislature as a Republican,” the state politician said. Yehoshua demurred, responding that he was studying and not available.

“Well, please think about it,” he was told.

He did think about it. And eventually he came to the conclusion, “Maybe the time is now.” He davened, spoke to rabbanim and to his mentor, and was told, “You can go on the condition you don’t compromise your Torah values.”

Convincing constituents was one thing, convincing the state legislature was another. Bedrick prepares his position (2008)

This actually wouldn’t be the first time Yehoshua ran for public office. His political career and interests began while he was still in college, and he’d tried for a shot at the legislature in 2004.

“September 11 happened a few weeks into my freshman year,” he explains. “It caused me to grow very interested in foreign policy, and public policy in general. I took all the classes Babson had to offer on these subjects.” During his junior year, he was assigned a project to research an area of public policy, and he chose education policy in New Hampshire. “The American dream is premised upon equality of opportunity,” he says. “But that equality is compromised if there’s no access to a quality education.”

It was at that point that he connected to award-winning economist Milton Friedman’s insight that while public subsidy of education is essential in creating productive citizens and (in a democracy) well-informed voters, it does not follow from this that government should run those schools. Friedman advocated for the government to give families vouchers and allow them to choose their own schools, claiming this would create a more efficient system that would better benefit low-income students. In other words, the government should subsidize students, not schools.

“At the time, I wasn’t yet frum, so I saw this as a social justice issue,” Yehoshua says. “It didn’t seem fair to me that kids who lived in poor districts couldn’t get access to a better education.”

The words “private school” typically summon images of elite institutions for the wealthy, but Yehoshua says that in reality, the vast majority of private schools in the US are religious institutions (New York is the only state in which a majority of those are Jewish). There are also many specialized schools for children with disabilities such as autism or dyslexia. School choice is designed to allow parents to choose schools that best suit their children’s needs and their own philosophies of pedagogy and academic success, as long as there is no educational abuse or neglect.

As a result of his research, Yehoshua was convinced that vouchers were what families needed. The New Hampshire legislature was less enthusiastic. That year a bill was introduced in New Hampshire to create public school vouchers, and it lost by just one vote.

Yehoshua was devastated, and went to share his dismay with his professor. The professor looked at him and responded, “So what are you going to do about it?”

“That was my ayeka moment,” Yehoshua says. “I decided I could and would do something. I went back to Windham and entered the race for state legislature in 2004 as an independent. It was a great experience — I was able to speak to all sorts of people from the community, get some endorsements, speak about school choice. I didn’t win, but for an unknown independent I did pretty well.”

When he returned to the campaign trail in 2006 at the request of his former supporters, they were surprised to find he’d changed since 2004. Now he sported a black hat and a beard. One of the men nervously touched his own face. “Well, I also grow a beard in the winter, but I shave it off before campaign season… you know, studies show that clean-shaven politicians do better in the polls….”

Before the man could continue, Yehoshua seized the moment to lay down his personal code. “I’m not shaving my beard,” he told them. “I can’t campaign in non-kosher restaurants or churches. No Friday night or Saturday campaigning [which meant missing high school football games, great for publicity, and the local Saturday morning trek to the garbage dump, as the area had no public pickup].” It was the fall, and he had to take campaign breaks for Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Succos.

His refusal to shake hands with women was likewise a challenge. His flyers read “Traditional Values, Fresh Ideas,” and when a woman approached him with a hand outstretched, he promptly put a flyer in it (and, failing that, a campaign pen). When he began getting flak about his refusal to touch women, he won over the ladies of the Salem Women’s Club with a letter explaining his religious views, including some flattering references to female spiritual superiority.

Despite all the hurdles, Yehoshua won the election — by six votes. He became New Hampshire’s very first Orthodox legislator in a state that has few Jews and no Orthodox synagogue (except for a Chabad House). He became known for bringing a bright red lunch bag with his own kosher food to join cafeteria and restaurant conversations where so many political deals are hammered out. Since legislative sessions run from January through June, he was able to learn in yeshivah the other months.

Unfortunately, the school voucher bill he had entered the race to promote failed miserably. “Back then, I gave a speech in the House, and they saw me as a kind of crazy person,” he says. “People told me, ‘It was a great speech, but I’m not voting for it.’ Today, 16 years later, the school choice movement has evolved from an extreme philosophy to a mainstream and almost inevitable idea.”

Yehoshua was asked to run for a second term, but was unsure whether he should leave yeshivah to do it. After some back and forth with his rabbanim, he decided to put his name on the ballot for the primary without campaigning. If he won the primary, he’d go home to campaign. Rabbi Dovid Dick told him during a farbrengen that Elul, “I give you a brachah to lose and stay in yeshivah.” Yehoshua replied, “Rebbi, just give me a brachah that if I lose it will be by a small margin, so it will be respectable.” He failed to win renomination by just one vote.

With former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee and Rabbi Moshe Bleich of the Wellesley-Weston Chabad, who would scour the newspapers to ferret out unaffiliated neshamos – and found Yehoshua

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ehoshua hence remained in yeshivah, giving up his princely legislator’s salary of $100 a year. That move brought him personal and spiritual progress though, and he soon met his wife Chaya, who grew up in an Orthodox family in Arizona, and he continued learning in kollel.

But the school choice issue was still important to him. To advance that agenda, he enrolled in Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government for a master’s degree in public policy, with a focus on education. There he became close to Rabbi Shlomo Yaffe, who at the time was scholar-in-residence at the Harvard Chabad (he now has a shul outside Worcester), an autodidact who used to match wits with top brains from Harvard’s medical school, theology program, business school, and Kennedy School during his Lunch-and-Learn sessions.

“The students chose the topics, and Rabbi Yaffe could always hold his own,” Yehoshua says. “I still consider him my rav, although I also have a close connection to the head shaliach in Phoenix, Rabbi Zalman Levertov.”

By 2010, the Republicans in New Hampshire had taken back control of the state legislature. Again they wanted to push through a school choice bill, and he was asked by New Hampshire legislators to write it. The aim was to create a tax-credit scholarship policy, in which individuals receive tax credits for contributing to nonprofit scholarship organizations that help low- and middle-income families pay for private school tuition.

“My master’s thesis was based on this bill,” he says. “It included a review of the literature on the effects of school choice, the civic outcomes it produces, and the proximity of students to good private schools.”

The New Hampshire bill passed, although it required a ping-pong among the branches of government to become law. First it was vetoed by the governor. Then the legislature overrode the veto (“a neis, a very rare event,” Yehoshua says). Then it was struck down again by a lawsuit. But when an appeal was brought before the New Hampshire Supreme Court, the court upheld the bill unanimously.

A decade later, Yehoshua was involved with another effort in New Hampshire to expand educational opportunity. This time he was working as Policy Director for EdChoice, an organization founded by Milton Friedman to advance school choice in all 50 states. This time, the bill was to create an ESA, or Educational Savings Account, for students. This is like a health savings account which can cover any necessary educational expenses, from tuition to tutoring to school supplies and textbooks for pupils. If the money isn’t consumed during the school year, it rolls over to the next year. The bill passed and was signed into law in 2021.

Ten states now have such ESA accounts. Some of them, like Arizona, offer them to all students, while others, like New Hampshire, offer them only to low-income students (about a third of the student body). Arizona bases the dollar amount for its ESAs on the state portion of per-pupil spending in public schools — in that state, about $7,000 a year.

Leading a tour of the state capitol with fellow legislators in 2008. Yehoshua was New Hampshire’s first Orthodox legislator in a state that has few Jews and no Orthodox synagogue

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ccording to Yehoshua, more and more parents are warming up to the ESA concept and freedom of choice. Many became disenchanted with public school education during Covid. They watched their children’s classrooms via Zoom and didn’t like what they saw. There’s also a backlash in some quarters against the cult of “woke” politics in the educational establishment.

“There’s more and more divergence between the values pushed in public schools and home values, and that’s driving the push for more school choice,” Yehoshua says. “Many parents want to go back to basics in education, to see standards upheld and their children educated with a love of their country, warts and all.

“Critical race theory and radical gender ideology are basically a form of religion without a tzelem, with its own concept of goodness and sin. But those involved are not self-aware enough to see these agendas as evangelical in their own way.”

In 2021, 19 states passed new or expanded school choice policies, including five new ESA policies. The year 2022 was an election year, usually slower for policy, but Yehoshua says the floodgates have been opened. Many red states, such as Texas, Oklahoma, Idaho, Ohio, and Florida are expressing the desire to start or expand their ESA programs.

While opponents of school choice fear that expanding choice will create a “death spiral” for public schools, causing the best and brightest to flee, research shows that it doesn’t happen. The students who were doing well typically stay in the school, while it is the lower-performing students who leave. Furthermore, the element of competition creates a strong incentive for public schools to improve: 25 of 28 studies found improvement in public school performance when school choice became available.

Many public schools are struggling, and it’s often because they’re being asked to do too much. When accused of falling short to educate young people, the standard reply is, “We’ll only be able to teach if we solve the poverty problem.”

“But schools can’t solve poverty,” Yehoshua says. “Pouring more money into public schools has little to do with the outcome. Washington D.C., for example, spends about $30,000 per student, yet their public schools have an abysmal record.” Much the same could be said of many New York schools.

Public schools have added staff while nevertheless showing a decline in educational standards. While in the past 65 years (1950-2015) the number of K-12 students in the country doubled, the number of teachers increased by 243 percent. Both were wildly outpaced by the addition of non-teaching staff — administrators, assistants, counselors, and DEI (diversity, equality and inclusion) staff, whose numbers have increased by 709 percent. “When equity, not excellence, is the goal, and we allow for the soft bigotry of low expectations, education suffers,” Yehoshua says.

After finishing his master’s degree, Yehoshua was hired by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington, D.C., to serve as part of their Center for Education.

“They had helped with my New Hampshire campaign and already knew me,” he says. After four and a half years there, he took a position with EdChoice as its Director of Policy for another five years. Think tanks, Yehoshua explains, are generally nonprofit organizations comprised of policy experts who develop policy ideas and offer advice to policymakers. He spends his days conducting research, compiling reports and policy briefs, communicating with the public via op-eds, radio, podcasts, social media, and so on, and working with state-level coalitions in over a dozen states to advance school choice. The latter entails speaking at events or conferences, advising state legislators, and testifying before legislative committees.

Most recently, he has moved on to the Heritage Foundation, another conservative D.C. think tank, where, working remotely as he did for Cato and EdChoice, he’s part of its Center for Education Policy. It’s a huge organization with a few hundred employees (he’s the only frum one), and a wider focus. It has deep pockets (a budget of $75 million) and more power to implement policy as well as craft it. He’s been there since May, continuing his mission of advocacy for school choice.

“Expanding educational opportunity is a vocation for me, not just a job,” he says. “I’ve worked in two dozen states and testified in many state legislatures.”

He focuses not only on school choice, but on topics like character-based education and religious liberty in education, working not only with Agudath Israel (particularly Rabbi A.D. Motzen) but with Rabbi Mitch Rocklin of the Tikvah Fund and Howard Slugh of the Jewish Coalition for Jewish Liberty, as well as many non-Jewish groups. And like many others, Yehoshua fears government intrusion into yeshivos will be not just a matter of academic standards but of pushing a political agenda.

“It’s just a matter of time before the government tries to impose secular values on our students, as they’re doing in Britain,” Yehoshua says. “We have to nip it in the bud, but I’m hopeful. We can try to slow things down, push back on procedural things, and buy time. Politicians and issues come and go, and we can try to ride it out.”

He doesn’t put much stock in the complaints of disaffected, formerly chassidic people who claim they were deprived of a decent education. Naftuli Moster, the head of YAFFED (Young Advocates for Fair Education, a group advocating for secular education in chassidic yeshivos) has stated that when he got to college he was embarrassed because he didn’t know what a molecule was.

“Look,” Yehoshua says, “When I walked into yeshivah for the first time, there were lots of words I didn’t know either. You pick it up. What our yeshivah students acquire is the ability to sit for long hours to analyze complicated texts, texts which are not in their native language, from many different angles. They are taught to see learning as something they should love, something that will be a lifelong process. This gives them a solid preparation to acquire any other body of knowledge.”

He adds that Moster, despite his supposedly woeful education in chassidic schools, managed to graduate summa cum laude from college, a feat few public-school children are able to pull off despite their “superior” education.

The big question worrying the Jewish community is that if the government enforces “school equivalence,” insisting that yeshivos adhere to an imposed curriculum, what exactly will it be looking to impose? “We don’t want to be substantially equivalent. We want to be substantially different,” Yehoshua insists. “Yeshivos and public schools have different standards of excellence.

“So far the yeshivos have fended it off,” he says, “but one of our Founding Fathers said it best, I believe: ‘The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.’ ”  —

Skewed Statistics

In an opinion piece for the Washington Examiner this past September entitled, “The New York Time’s Botched Attack on Jewish Schools,” Yehoshua Bedrick eviscerated arguments that chassidic students are doomed to poverty and dependency unless the government intervenes. He brought numbers to show that the chassidic community’s schools are taking very little public money per pupil (between $2,500 and $5,000, as compared to the $31,000 the state pays for public school students). He also explained why the poverty statistics about the community were skewed and misleading, since chassidim tend to have large families and a lower median age. “They may be using public services like WIC or Medicaid, but they aren’t using the public school system,” he points out. “There is no evidence that chassidic students are so far behind they can’t function in society or support themselves.

“The state should only mix in if there is compelling evidence that a large swath of a school’s population emerges incapable of providing for themselves in society,” he says. “In the chassidic community, this is simply not the case.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 943)