Maybe this is what the Founders meant by “tyranny of the majority.”

For years it seems the school board in East Ramapo, an overwhelmingly Orthodox Jewish town in Rockland County, has been defunding the town’s public schools, most of whose students are black and Hispanic.

Since two-thirds of the students in town are attending private yeshivas, the residents and their democratically elected representatives on the school board don’t want to see more of their taxes go toward funding the public schools.

Indeed, they want more of the local resources to be put toward public transportation for private school students as well as educating Orthodox special-needs students in pricey private schools when it’s possible their needs could be met more affordably elsewhere.

Last week, the state Department of Education appointed a monitor to oversee the school board in East Ramapo. The monitor won’t have any veto power so it’s hard to see how this move will change very much.

If you want to know how to end this standoff, it’s pretty simple. Like most problems with our education system, what ails East Ramapo could be solved with school choice.

On the surface, it seems as if the district is spending plenty on educating the children there. In 2012, it was $27,668 per child, well above the state average of $21,038.

And the amount of money spent on education doesn’t have much to do with the likelihood of a student graduating. The worst public-school districts in the country spend some of the highest amounts per pupil.

Money doesn’t necessarily buy you better teachers — the unions make sure of that. Plenty of the money is spent on bad teachers or retired teachers or expenses entirely unrelated to education.

Yet there’s no doubt that there have been severe cuts in the number of teachers and in certain programs at the schools. Citing a report investigating the town’s finances, Meryl Tisch, head of the New York Board of Regents, noted that East Ramapo had “eliminated hundreds of staff members, including over 100 teachers, dozens of teaching assistants, guidance counselors and social workers, and many key administrators.

Full-day kindergarten and high-school electives have been eliminated or scaled back. Music, athletics, professional development and extracurricular activities were cut.”

The majority of families in the town, though, are trying to educate their own (often large) families in the way that they see fit, while also being stuck with the bill for educating everyone else’s children.

But the school board hasn’t been transparent — sometimes even holding meetings in secret. They have also sold public-school facilities to private ones at rock-bottom prices. And there is no reason why a public school parent should trust them.

Many would say that it’s an argument against local control of schools.

Chester Finn, president emeritus of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, believes that local control “is archaic in today’s America. Every school should be self-governing — charter like — and overseen by state or state-approved authorizer.

“And everyone should choose their own school, with all public monies for a kid’s education following her to the school of choice.”

In East Ramapo, the board’s interests and the interests of the parents have diverged. The best thing for the public-school kids would be a voucher program that would allow them to choose a private school for their kids or even a public school in another district.

Indeed, this would also be the best solution for the Orthodox Jewish population as well. Instead of trying to figure out ways to afford New York’s high property taxes as well as how to afford private schools for their children, they would be able to take these vouchers to the schools of their choice, too.

Perhaps what’s most disturbing about East Ramapo is that it is not so different from the rest of our public-education system. The people at the top — I’m talking about you, President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan — are making decisions about the funding and spending and curricula of schools they would never send their kids to. It’s time for a change.

Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.