The role of the public education system is both singular and clear: to nurture Israel’s students and provide them with the knowledge, skills, and tools that can enable them to become productive, independent, and engaged citizens. This is not one of the system’s goals among many – it is its only goal. All other considerations, including teachers’ employment conditions, important as those may be, are merely means to an end. When the means become the end, and when job security and labor organization become supreme values, the education system gradually ceases to fulfill its purpose.
Public debate about the state of Israel’s education system tends to flare up around specific crises: strikes, teacher shortages, or standalone statements that sparks a media storm. Such was the case when the Teachers’ Union Director Yaffa Ben David said that “the student shouldn’t be at the center. With all due respect to everyone else, the teaching staff member should be at the center.” But this statement was not a slip of the tongue, it was an honest articulation of a deep and entrenched worldview – one that has effectively shaped the rules of the game in the education system for many years: a system calibrated first and foremost to the needs of its employees, and only afterward, if at all, to the needs of its students.
It’s important to emphasize that this is not about disrespecting teachers. Teachers of quality are the most influential factor on student achievement within a school. It is precisely for this reason that the central failure of Israel’s education system is its lack of understanding how to identify or reward excellence in teaching, or how to build a professional environment that attracts good teachers, retains them, and allows them to flourish. The problem is not a lack of respect for teachers, but rather an institutional structure that erases the differences between excellent and subpar teachers; paralyzes managerial authority; and replaces educational judgment with organizational considerations.
Students Pay the Price
Over the years, one basic assumption that has become entrenched in Israel is that improving education depends almost exclusively on across-the-board salary increases and enhanced job security for teachers. Every reform carried out ended with a wage agreement; every crisis was explained as teachers fleeing the profession; and every criticism of academic achievement was met with the claim that one cannot demand quality from a system that doesn’t reward its employees. However, accumulated experience teaches us otherwise: uniform salary increases improve occupational welfare but do not change how the system operates. They don’t create incentives for excellence, don’t improve management, and don’t reduce disparities.
We all know the results. Despite high public investment, Israeli students’ achievements remain mediocre at best in international tests, and their social and geographic disparities are among the highest in the developed world. Students from strong backgrounds often succeed despite the system – through private lessons, supplementary frameworks, and family cultural capital – while students from weaker backgrounds are almost entirely dependent on school quality. In a system that doesn’t incentivize quality and doesn’t allow real management, disparities are not a malfunction but a predictable outcome.
The root of the problem is not in individual classrooms or specific teachers, but in the the system’s overall structure. Israel’s education system is exceptionally centralized. The Ministry of Education determines almost every aspect: curricula, hourly standards, salary grades, and employment structures. School principals, who are meant to be educational leaders, bear responsibility for their schools’ results but have almost no authority over their most important resource – human capital. They cannot reward excellence and can only with great difficulty dismiss unsuitable teachers. This does not harm only the principals; this has a direct negative impact on students.
Within this structure, the teachers’ unions operate as powerful players. They are not merely representative bodies but hold effective veto power over any significant change to the system. While they originally served an important role in protecting teachers from arbitrariness, they have gradually become the gatekeepers of the status quo. They defend a uniform and rigid employment structure that incentivizes seniority and tenure at the expense of quality and excellence, and sometimes go so far as to block reforms that don’t directly affect salary – such as data transparency, examination changes, or modifications to the work week and vacation schedule.
What Happens When “Teachers Are at the Center”?
The economic literature on public sector labor unions describes this dynamic well: when an organization enjoys exclusivity in representation and a high capacity to strike, it tends to maximize stability and uniformity for its members, especially the veteran ones, even at the cost of harming service quality to the public. In education, the public is the students and their parents – but their voice is weak, dispersed, and transient. A student is in the system for only a number of years; the union operates for decades. This creates a system calibrated inward toward employees’ needs, rather than outward, toward the needs of the served public.
This also explains the meaning of the slogan “teachers at the center.” When the teachers are defined as the center of the system, its success is measured by employment satisfaction and the extent of protections they are granted. When the students are at the center, the questions are entirely different: Is learning improving? Are students acquiring relevant skills? Are disparities being reduced? These questions require evaluation, accountability, and distinction between success and failure – components that the existing structure finds it a struggle to implement.
It is no coincidence that almost every attempt to introduce differential compensation, performance-based evaluation, or real managerial autonomy encounters fierce resistance. The official argument is always defense of “the teachers’ dignity,” but in practice, the defense is of a system in which there is almost no price for failure or reward for excellence. Both excellent teachers and subpar teachers advance at the same pace, earn virtually the same amount, and enjoy the same level of job security. Such a system struggles to attract and retain truly qualitative human capital – and it’s very telling that high attrition rates in the early years are characteristic of good teachers in particular, who have other employment alternatives.
The Children are Left Behind: Who Really Runs the Education System?
The shortage of teachers of quality is not therefore a budgetary failure but an institutional one. Talented young people are not deterred by hard work or responsibility; they are deterred by a system that doesn’t reward excellence, doesn’t offer a real track for professional advancement, and determines income and position primarily by seniority. Across-the-board salary increases can provide temporary relief but don’t change the basic attractiveness of the profession for those seeking meaning alongside professionalism.
This also leads to certain conclusions regarding desirable policies. The question is not how to “improve teachers’ conditions so that perhaps education will improve,” but rather how to build a system that produces quality education – and what are the employment and management conditions required for that purpose.
In this context, the Kohelet Policy Forum’s policy papers propose not an ideological revolution but structural change. Their central idea is not “privatization” or “harming teachers,” but rather creating a system where schools have real autonomy, where budgets are attached to the students, and in which principals can manage, reward, and dismiss their staff. Greater freedom of choice for parents, controlled competition between frameworks, and more flexible teacher employment are not ends unto themselves, but tools for creating a better match between educational quality and compensation and continuity. It also requires willingness to reduce the veto power of teachers’ unions in places where it directly harms student welfare.
This proposed reform is not against teachers. On the contrary: it is a reform for professional teachers, for excellence, and for a system that honors teachers through responsibility, freedom of action, and genuine recognition of their contribution. We have no doubt that these changes could elevate the teaching profession. But primarily, this reform returns the student to the center – not as a slogan, but as a practical principle. Quality education is not a byproduct of employment stability; it is the result of a system that places quality, accountability, and excellence above organizational convenience.
(First published in Hebrew in N12)
