By Ruth Steinhardt
As the gap between the rich and poor widens in Israel, the achievement gap between students in differing socioeconomic strata has widened as well, according to a series of studies presented this week during a conference at the George Washington University’s Graduate School of Education and Human Development.
The conference, “International Perspectives on Economic Inequality and Educational Opportunity,” was a chance for scholars working in Israel to present preliminary findings on research relating to income inequality and education—an issue as relevant to American policymakers as it is to Israeli.
“The news from both countries, about the effects of income inequality on education, can be depressing. But good research is providing needed information and is a source of optimism. We need all the optimism we can get,” said GSEHD Dean Michael Feuer, citing the “complex challenges associated with income inequality” and emphasizing the cross-cultural relevance of such issues.
As in the United States, Israel’s educational system is divided into three tiers—primary school, middle school and high school—and is free and compulsory from kindergarten through 12th grade. But unlike the United States, where school funding is primarily local and often derived from property taxes, Israeli schools are primarily subsidized by the central government. Public education is divided into three main tracks: state-funded secular schools, state-funded Jewish religious schools and Arab schools catering to Israel’s heterogeneous Arab population. There also are “ultra-orthodox” Jewish schools, which are only partially funded by the state and which focus chiefly on Torah studies.
As the ethnographic makeup of Israel changes, the relevance of these tracks has changed as well, said Noah Lewin-Epstein, professor of sociology and dean of the faculty of social science at Tel Aviv University. The Jewish secular schools, which used to constitute the educational “mainstream,” have declined in their relative share of enrollments. Meanwhile, numbers are up in both the ultra-orthodox and Arab schools, where students tend to be poorer.
As those changes take place, the gaps in income between the students in each track, and the achievement gaps when they graduate, have become more glaring.
“There is a great disparity in achievement,” Dr. Lewin-Epstein said. “What might be more disturbing, the gaps between socioeconomic groups do not narrow as kids go through the educational system. They’re probably even expanding.”
The purpose of their research projects, he said, was “to learn more broadly about educational trends, to look at them more broadly within Israeli society, to identify data needs and to begin to understand how to address and improve the situation.”
To those ends, the Israeli teams focused on four areas of research: Socioeconomic residential segregation, trends in resource investment in education, early childhood education, and school climate and socioeconomic mobility.
Audrey Addi-Raccah, an associate professor in the Educational Administration, Policy and Leadership Program at Tel Aviv University, found that educational and geographic segregation were tightly linked—partly as a result of self-determination, as when ultra-orthodox religious communities choose to live together, and partly as a reflection of structural realities, as when barriers prevent the Arab population from integrating into mainstream Jewish society.
Such segregation, said panelist Adam Gamoran, president of the William T. Grant Foundation, is analogous to what is happening in the United States.
In Nashville, where Dr. Gamoran recently completed a study, mandates requiring increased geographical and racial diversity recently were lifted. To prevent students from poorer areas suffering as a result, the Nashville school system diverted extra resource funds to schools in underfunded areas, creating “enhanced option” schools where they anticipated greater racial isolation and a higher percentage of students in poverty. The result, Dr. Gamoran said, was that there was no achievement change associated with the increasing concentration of poor and minority students.
“The quality of students’ experience in school matters more than the nature of students’ classmates,” Dr. Gamoran said. “But that doesn’t let segregation off the hook, because we generally find that segregated school environments tend to be less resource-rich. Certainly this is true in the case of Israel.”
Nachum Blass, a lecturer at the Center for Academic Studies in Or Yehuda and a senior researcher in education at the Taub Center for Social Policy Studies, said these questions and problems would only become more urgent.
“Once, we [in Israel] thought we were a homogenous, centralistic society,” he said. “There was one mainstream group and then a jumble of ‘peripherals.’ But now our society is very diverse, with at least four large substantially distinct socio-economic, ideological and cultural groups, each one sharing a separate educational system. In order to have the same educational outcomes [across such a diverse group], we will have to invest much more than we had to before, because we have much bigger groups of students from lower socio-economic classes.”