Mr. Siegel said that politicians “don’t want to touch the issue” of secular education in yeshivas because of their desire to retain support among ultra-Orthodox voters.

When asked whether political concerns had anything to do with the seeming lack of progress in the investigation, Austin Finan, a spokesman for the mayor, said in an email that the inquiry was “active and ongoing.”

There is evidence to support the group’s contention that the investigation has stalled, however. In July, Harry Hartfield, a spokesman for the Education Department, said that it was “in the process of finalizing a set of requests” that superintendents would send to the yeshivas in their districts. Last month, Mr. Hartfield, using the same words, told the neighborhood news site Patch that the department was “in the process of finalizing” the requests and would send them out “soon.”

Mr. Finan said on Wednesday that it was “inaccurate” to say the requests had not been sent out, but declined to comment further.

Mr. Moster called on the Education Department to appoint full-time investigators to lead the inquiry, to be transparent about the investigation’s progress and to make unannounced visits to the yeshivas to see what instruction they were providing. The department has suggested that it may conduct visits, but has not said anything more about them.

Chaim Levin, 26, who attended the news conference, said that when he was a child, his yeshiva, Oholei Torah in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, offered no English education at all. He showed his third-grade report card, which listed marks in prayer, the study of Torah and Talmud, Hebrew spelling, penmanship, Yiddish and Jewish history. He said he was now in his second semester of college and was hoping to become a lawyer, but that he was dreading having to take a math class, because he had never learned algebra.

A mother spoke about her concerns for her son’s education, but asked to be identified only by her first initial, S., because she feared a backlash from her insular community She said that her 9-year-old son attends a Hasidic yeshiva in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and that he was already losing interest in secular subjects because they were valued so little at the school.

“I think New York City is failing my kid,” she said.