- Unquestionably, Minister Yoav Kisch is correct in observing that the war was a factor. Students in Israel were indeed affected by the war, by canceled school days, by enlisted teachers and by the general atmosphere of distraction. However, this wasn’t an inescapable circumstance. Other civil systems handled emergency situations better and managed to minimize damage. The Israeli education system also performed during the global coronavirus pandemic in such a way that Israeli students were set back more than their counterparts in most other countries.
- What is true for regular times holds even truer in emergency situations – a decentralized system, one that can make decisions on the ground, functions better and solves problems faster and more adaptively to local issues. A rigid system that performs like an aircraft carrier collapses during emergencies.
- Moreover, the system didn’t only deteriorate in this past term, but rather continued with the previous decline. School principals are once more reporting on a shortage of teachers, as well as on the sub-par quality of their current workforce. While 50% of school principals – as opposed to 39% in the OECD – report a shortage, the real glaring point of data is that 47% of teachers are unsuitable or insufficiently trained (in contrast to only 25% in the OECD). In contrast to other countries, school principals in Israel lack the autonomy to set initial salaries or grant raises, which naturally impacts their ability to hire teachers to specific subjects.
- Another data point that seems to contradict the last report is that in recent years, the student-to-teacher ratio has been reduced relative to other countries. Despite classes in Israel being larger (30 students on average versus 26), Israel has only 9.5 students per teacher as opposed to the OECD’s 12.7 average, representing a decrease of 1.4 students per teacher as compared to 2022. In other words, many teachers are being added to the system, but they are neither of the required quality nor in the subjects that lack teachers. This is a clear sign of a primary state failure, one that stems from centralization, the uniform salary agreement, and the substantial weight given to seniority over quality or demand in the field in determining salaries.
- The teacher shortage crisis will not be solved by throwing more money at the system, nor by a uniform salary increase for all Israel’s teachers, as was done in previous wage agreements. All human resource management needs to be transferred down to the field level – to the schools themselves, to strong local authorities, to education networks that should operate at the elementary school level – such that all recruitment, salary, and dismissal decisions come under the authority of school principals or heads of networks and local education departments. Salaries should be adapted to local shortages, to subjects that lack teachers, and to positions with more responsibility. The entire employment structure today is a Procrustean bed being forced onto the system, dragging it toward the abyss. We might suddenly discover that once employment is decentralized, the system actually has large surplus of teachers – some of whom are neither needed nor useful, but who cost us a great deal.
- A system that fails to measure itself, doesn’t report students’ achievements to their parents, doesn’t report its schools’ achievements to the general public, doesn’t manage improvement processes based on internal metrics, and cancels comparative tests left and right, shouldn’t be surprised when international exams reveal a decline. There is no improvement process that isn’t conditional on oversight tools and systemic transparency.
- To close with a bright spot: Haredi girls once again showed relatively high achievements, demonstrating that the Ministry of Education’s control and supervision are not the most important factor, and it is possible to reach better achievements even in private frameworks. Hopefully these achievements can be replicated soon among Haredi boys as well. Without drawing firm conclusions, there may be a connection between students’ high exposure – worldwide in general, and even more so in Israel – to smartphones and social media, both during school hours and after, and the decline in the ability to perform long tasks requiring attention and concentration. It is possible that Haredi female students, who are less exposed to this phenomenon, manage to avoid the negative effects. But this is only a hypothesis, and requires empirical confirmation. In any case, the OECD, which examined the decline present across all member countries, has already pointed to this issue as one of the most important for examination and research.
