Israel’s education system fails Zoom test
With an enormous number of poor Israeli students lacking computers and a state that seems unable to supply them, distance learning has no chance of success.
“Our greatest fear is that the gap between the weaker and stronger sectors of the population will expand in such a way that it cancels all the achievements of an entire decade,” Minister of Welfare Itzik Shmuli told Al-Monitor.
Israel may be an economic success story, but the coronavirus has revealed how large these gaps are, and how many Israelis don’t share in the wealth. Many children don’t have a computer at home, and in many hundreds of thousands of homes, several children have to share a single computer. Attending school via Zoom actually increases the gap between poor students and their wealthier friends.
Countries all around the world have come up with all sorts of solutions for education in the time of the coronavirus. Israel seems to be less successful, particularly when it comes to its sectors with weak or no access to the internet and technological tools like laptops and tablets to continue their studies.
Like the rest of the Israeli government at the start of the pandemic, the Ministry of Education was caught unprepared. Its focus was on the impending election and the transition period before a government was formed. The transition to distance learning in March 2020 depended on teachers producing video classes, but most teachers were never trained for the task. They therefore spent many long weeks learning to do so while simultaneously trying to teach.
