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Friday December 21, 2007

Strike’s over, but are schools going under?

by dina kraft
jta

tel aviv | Though striking high school teachers and the Israeli government finally reached a deal to reopen the schools, the extent of the protracted work stoppage has exposed the depth of a crisis in the country’s public education system that is far from abating.

Before the agreement Dec. 13, the teachers had been on strike for more than two months, leaving Israeli teenagers spending most of their autumn hanging out at malls rather than studying in classrooms.

Struggling under the weight of overcrowded classes and a workforce of disgruntled teachers who earn an average of $1,500 per month, the Israeli education system is failing parents, students and teachers, many Israelis say.

Some parents are abandoning the system altogether, turning to private schools when possible. Teachers, in search of better pay, are leaving too. Those who remain are paying the price, parents and teachers say.

“Middle schools are a total disaster,” said Sharon Tischler, one of a group of parents who helped found a private middle school and high school in Ra’anana five years ago. The school, called Neitarim, focuses on pluralistic education and brings together religious and secular students.

“In this country, education is straight from the book,” Tischler said. Students “don’t learn to write or analyze — it’s a joke. High school is totally focused on matriculation exams and provides some substance, but there is no breadth of education.”

The signs that the Israeli public education system is in crisis abound.

Israel ranks toward the bottom of the list of Western nations in international education assessments. The same assessments also show that among developed nations, Israel has the widest disparity in academic achievement between wealthy and poor students.

A poll of 2,000 Israelis published last week by Israel 2020, a new social action forum, showed that education tops the list of national problems young Israelis want to see addressed.

Middle-class and upper-middle-class parents of children in public schools commonly send their kids to after-school tutors to ensure they receive the one-on-one attention and enrichment that is absent from their regular school day.

A growing number of parents are seeking refuge from the public school system in private schools. This has only exacerbated problems in the public system, some argue, because many private schools in Israel also receive government funding and therefore drain resources from the public schools.

Judith Butler, an education professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, says it is distressing to see parents subsidize their children’s education. She says it widens the socioeconomic gap and takes pressure off the government to save the public school system.

“Private schools are obvious solutions for the privileged, but they are not a solution and are also a great disadvantage for the nonprivileged,” Butler said.

“I think one of the messages of both the teachers’ strike and our strike,” she noted, referring to an ongoing strike of university professors, “is about reinforcing and strengthening public education.”

Officials at the Education Ministry reject such notions. They say the ministry is seeking to improve the public school system with reforms that include a longer school day and more enrichment courses.

“What we want to do is to make the public schools strong,” Shauly Peer, a spokesman for the ministry, said.

Shmuly Bing, a high school teacher in the Jerusalem suburb of Mevasseret Zion, says the government’s neglect of public schools for private schools is hurting the poorest of students, including Arabs and residents of the rural far north and south of the country.

“The government is acting as if parents who want a good education for their children will have to be expected to pay for it,” Bing said. “The question is whether or not Israel provides a public education.”

The unprecedented 65-day secondary school teachers’ strike ended just hours before a court deadline that would have sent the teachers back to work.

The teachers, who had demanded pay hikes and smaller classes, were promised an 8.5 percent pay raise in turn for adding two hours of private tutoring a week. The deal also included another 5 percent raise over the next three years coupled with a 4 percent increase in wages to cover cost-of-living adjustments. The ministry also pledged to reduce the number of students in each classroom.

Ministry officials hope the deal reached last week will help stem the tide of teachers leaving the public school system in search of higher paying jobs.

Haggai Lavie, who not long ago quit his teaching job to run a youth leadership program in Jerusalem, said he remains frustrated by his experience in the classroom, where large, unruly classes and a lack of time made high-quality teaching virtually impossible.

“For centuries the main treasure of Jewish culture and the Jewish people was always education. It is study that preserved us for centuries,” he said. “We are starting to lose that, and I am definitely worried.”

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