Among the more widely discussed points in the report, the Commission recommended to extend the school day from 4 hours a day to 7, and to create a 5-day school week instead of six. Compulsory education would begin at age three, rather than five. The number of teachers would be reduced, and those who remain would be required to have proper training, and would receive a much higher salary.
The combined effect of these measures would result in higher quality education and more in-depth preparation for students as well as greater job satisfaction for teachers.
Among the recommendations that have drawn the most controversy, the Committee recommended that schools below a certain student population level receive no state funding, and that all schools would be required to teach a minimum state curriculum in order to receive funding. These two recommendations have angered the National Religious and Haredi political parties respectively, since the vast majority of their schools would need to either fundamentally reform or be forced to manage without state funding.
Predictably, the Haredi community has come out against the recommendations. They have become a late issue in coalition negotiations between the Likud and the Haredi UTJ party, but a compromise is apparently being worked out that will allow the UTJ to join the government.
The National Religious Party, long the champion of education, has also come out against the recommendations, and has cited virtually every recommendation as problematic. This seems a bit surprising, given the importance the NRP has placed on receiving the education ministry in coalition negotiations throughout the past three decades.
But for the same reason, the NRP's position should not be surprising at all. What the Dovrat Committee has proposed, is to overhaul the entire educational system the NRP has worked so hard to build to its current level. What shows, more than anything else, the complete bankruptcy of the NRP, is that the recommendations of the Committee are necessary in the first place.
Israel is among the worst-performing countries in the developed world in educational testing, and the achievements of Israelis coming out of the school system are often despite the school system, rather than because of it. It can even be stated that a large part of Israeli achievement has come more as a result of education received in the IDF than education received in school.
The school system that has been painstakingly built over the past decades is tremendously out-dated. There is no reason that Israeli students should leave school at 1:00 pm or that such a large proportion of teachers should be without the proper training. There is no reason that teachers – those responsible for training future leaders in every field – those entrusted with developing Israel's richest national resource – should receive such paltry salaries that the best and brightest minds in Israel don't even consider the profession worth considering.
A large part of the blame for the mess that is Israeli education lies at the feet of the National Religious Party. The sheer chutzpa they show in opposing a proposal that is very likely to vastly improve Israeli educational results is proof that the NRP has still not learned its lessons.
Copyright 2005. All rights reserved. Yehuda Poch is a journalist living in Israel. Reproduction in electronic or print format by permission of the author only.
