Israeli school children are weak in reading, mathematics and science skills, according to test results issued Dec. 3 by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The failure of Israeli students as reflected in the results of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), which tests the reading, math and science skills of 15- and 16-year-old students, was twofold. Not only were their results below the average achieved by the students from 79 countries who took part in the 2018 testing, but the gap between the Jewish and Arab children’s achievements was huge given the poor performance of the Arab students, which declined compared to the 2015 results.
“Israel has the largest gap between its highest-performing schools and lowest-performing ones,” professor Andreas Schleicher, the OECD’s coordinator of PISA, explained to Israel’s Channel 13 News. “Social background is a powerful determinant of success in schools and I think those are challenges the [Israeli] system will need to address better in the future.”
Where does Israel’s education system go wrong? How was such a major gap formed between the achievements of Jewish and Arab students — 144 points in reading, 111 points in mathematics and 116 points in science? These data are even more serious given that the state’s education budget has almost doubled over the past decade, from 32 billion Israeli shekels ($9.2 billion) in 2009 to 62 billion shekels ($17.8 billion) in 2019.
“On the one hand, quite a few Arab schools — especially in the [predominantly Bedouin] southern region — lack computer and internet infrastructure, and on the other hand, authorities only wake up ahead of the PISA tests and start offering seminars and guidance for teachers. In my opinion, this is one of the most critical mistakes on the national level and not just in Arab schools,” math teacher Suheil Sharif, a former Ministry of Education official, told Al-Monitor. “True, the ministry has invested quite a bit of money [in the Arab education system], but it is worth examining whether the funds were invested in the right places.” According to a 2018 study by the Israel Democracy Institute, informal education programs in the Arab society received in 2015 a huge budget of 650 million shekels ($187 million) over a period of five years, but it seems that the Ministry of Education did not really know what to do with that money.
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