Underlining the crisis in the Israeli school system, an international education survey on Tuesday ranked Israel near the bottom of 57 Westernized countries - citing underpaid teachers, oversized classes and abysmal performances by students in math and science.
Teachers demonstrate outside the National Labor Court during the secondary school teachers' strike last year.
Photo: Ariel Jerozolimski
In response, the Education Ministry noted that the survey, though newly released, was based on statistics from 2006, and suggested that the latest curriculum reform package, "New Horizon," would lead to an improvement.
The annual education report of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a grouping of Westernized countries that measures growth and modernization around the world, essentially gave Israeli education an F: It showed that Israeli teachers earn around half of the global wage average, reported that class sizes in Israel are among the largest in the world, and featured results from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) exams that placed Israeli students in 39th and 40th place in math and science, respectively, out of 57 participating nations.
"We're basically destroying our next generation's chances to compete with the other countries," said Dani Ben-David, a professor of economics at Tel Aviv University, who has researched the Israeli system. "It's our future, and we're frittering it away."
On a rare positive note, the OECD report did show that a relatively high proportion of Israeli pupils complete 12 grades of school - 90% - compared to the OECD average of 83% and the US's 77%. However, the study did not indicate the percentage of Israeli high schoolers who complete full matriculation - currently less than two-thirds.
Education Minister Yuli Tamir cited the diversity of the Israeli education system as a uniquely demanding factor. "The Israeli education system is abnormally heterogeneous," Tamir said. "It's made up of four sub-systems - Hebrew state schools, Arab state schools, religious state schools and ultra-Orthodox schools. This multitude of disciplines requires additional budgets, a problem which the OCED's exemplary countries don't have to face."
The report did not hypothesize as to the sources of Israel's educational woes, but its findings suggested that overcrowding is a major factor, causing a chain reaction of negative trends and a possible link to the low PISA scores.
Junior-high schools hold an average of 33 students per classroom, as opposed to an average of 24 in other Western countries. Elementary school students fair slightly better with 28 kids per class, compared to 22 in other OECD countries.
Consequently, the student-teacher ratio in Israel is also one of the highest in the world - with an average of 17 students per teacher.
As for teachers' wages, the report showed that the average Israeli teacher earns about NIS 48,000 ($13,257) a year, as opposed to the average $27,828 (NIS 99,846) in other Western countries and $34,895 (NIS 125,370) in the US.
Ben-David, a former Kadima Knesset candidate, said the OECD's findings confirmed the ongoing crisis in the Israeli educational system, which he traced to three principal areas.
"The first problem is the general quality of teachers," he said. "While there are good teachers out there, we have teachers' colleges with acceptance requirements that are below the acceptance requirements of any Israeli university. How can we expect teachers to lift our kids up to the university level, when they're not necessarily at that level themselves?"
Next, Ben-David pointed to the insufficient time spent studying basic courses, or core curriculum, in the classroom. "There's a lot to be said about what we're teaching the kids, and how much time we spend teaching them," Ben-David charged. "When you look at the proportion of pupils studying science for less than two hours a week, you can understand why we're slipping in the PISA exams."
Finally, Ben-David lambasted the management structure within the education system as fundamentally flawed. "You have principals, essentially managing each school, with all of the accountability but no authority whatsoever to change anything. How can you give someone the responsibility of educating your children, when they themselves can't make the changes necessary to do so properly?"•
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