Low test scores, interrupted studies, diverging values: How dire is Israel’s school system? |
The story of the past six years in Israeli education has been one of disruption.
Take an Israeli child who, in about a month, is due to graduate from sixth grade. In 2019, that child entered kindergarten and, just a few months later, was kept home as COVID-19 swept Israel and the rest of the world. Restrictions, in one form or another, stretched into 2022.
Then, in fourth grade, came the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, invasion and all of the closures, restrictions and threats brought on by Israel’s subsequent multi-front war.
The most recent school shutdown, lasting more than a month during the US-Israeli war with Iran, ended in April, as this student prepared to conclude sixth grade, and almost exactly six years after COVID first interrupted their studies.
In between, there have also been multiple teachers’ strikes.
Altogether, said Oren Ozen, chair of the National Parents’ Council, students have lost 170 days of learning since 2020 — close to one full school year.
“There’s lots and lots to be done,” Ozen told The Times of Israel. “Since the year of the coronavirus, our children haven’t… even had one year of uninterrupted study. Every year, there was something else, be it the coronavirus, strikes, all those things. And every year they lost out.”
In a certain sense, then, it should come as no surprise that the leaked results of a government aptitude test found only three percent of ninth graders met the national benchmark for science. When it came to English skills, the number was 22%.
The data led opposition prime ministerial candidate Naftali Bennett to call for the declaration of a “national educational emergency,” and elicited a quick denial by Education Minister Yoav Kisch, who reportedly sought to conceal the poor results.
Kisch pointed out various ostensible problems with the data and attacked the leak as “an insult to the students of Israel, the teachers, the principals and the educators who are working with tremendous dedication.” (And the minister was reportedly due to deliver a piece of good news this week: A national math test for some graduating high school seniors demonstrated an improvement in performance.)
To Ozen and others immersed in the state of Israel’s schools, however, the alarming test results were merely a symptom of a deeper problem — and perhaps not even the main issue. The test scores came at a time when parts of the country face teacher shortages, a growing share of Israel’s students don’t learn core secular studies, and youth violence is surging, with deadly results.
Altogether, the picture has raised alarm in a country founded and run by the People of the Book, which has embraced the moniker of the Startup Nation, and which has survived and thrived in a hostile neighborhood in part by punching above its weight in the specialized, research-heavy fields of weapons development and the tech sector. Under current trends, experts say, all of that could be at risk.
“The whole point of going to school is actually bringing you to a point that you have job opportunities later, that you actually know what a liberal democracy is,” Dan Ben-David, president of the Shoresh........