Hundreds of schools in Israel are still searching for someone to head them in the upcoming school year, and thousands are scouring the country for teachers. The shortage in math, science and English teachers, and the general shortage in teaching staff in certain geographic areas, is well known. The Minister of Education himself announced a shortage of at least 1,700 teachers. The solution exists; he is simply not applying it.

The latest salary agreement between the Ministry of Finance and the Teachers’ Union stipulated that 6% of the teaching workforce would be hired by personal contracts. A call was issued already last summer for students and graduates of advanced degrees to submit their candidacy to a pilot program of 200 teaching positions in the Central and Tel Aviv region that suffers the most acute shortage. Within a few days, more than 700 people applied, among them high-tech workers and graduates from the Technion and other universities. The 200 most suitable candidates would have been hired at a relatively high starting salary, without tenure and with less bureaucratic restrictions on the schools hiring them.

These applicants will not leave their jobs to study education or go down the tortuous route of collective agreements. They are uninterested in a high salary 20 years down the road, and even less in tenure or representation in the Teachers’ Union. They want to teach, without the bureaucracy and red tape.

So the pilot program was published and the call issued for applications, but Yaffa Ben David, general secretary of the Teachers’ Union raised hell, and the Ministry of Education immediately backed down and froze the program. Ben David absurdly claims that signing the agreement regarding personal contracts was not an agreement that the budget for such would be at the expense of other teachers. This is simply a cynical attempt to sabotage the initiative at the expense of Israel’s schoolchildren, but the blame lies mostly with the Ministry of Education, which won’t insist on honoring the agreement to the letter.

Only last December the results of the TIMSS tests in math and science revealed that Israel has deteriorated further, scoring below countries such as Malta, Romania and Cyprus. This decline led Minister Kisch to establish a “review committee”, upon the conclusions of which he announced a five-year program called “Real Israel”, requesting another billion shekels for implementation.

Instead of utilizing the solution handed to him on a silver platter and introducing hundreds, if not thousands, of excellent teachers into the system through personal contracts, he is repeating the mistakes of previous ministers. A comprehensive report by McKinsey stated nearly twenty years ago: “The quality of a school system rests on the quality of its teachers.”

After repeated failures to attract talent to the field of education, a winning formula has been found, but it contains an element of decentralization, reducing the control of the Ministry of Education and creating an alternative model of hiring to the Teachers’ Union.

No entity likes to lose power and control, but for the upcoming school year, the Ministry of Education under Minister Kisch must show the union that it is not in control and choose between preserving its chokehold on the system and the good of the schools and the schoolchildren.

(First published in Israel National News (Arutz 7), “It is time to implement the existing solution for declining student achievement”, Jul 24, 2025).