 Israel's Education Woes Mirror Ours By JOHN REINIERS In My Own Words Published: Apr 25, 2008 We all believe that Israel is this tiny country populated with an over abundance of brilliant people. Not so. The Economist had an interesting piece on April 5 that noted that “Perhaps the most serious threat to Israel's long-term prosperity, and the one that most troubles ordinary Israelis is the state of the education system.”
The gold standard for educational achievement in the future may well turn out to be the OECD's PISA rankings (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development — Program for International Student Assessment.) The 2006 PISA rankings focused on science and placed Israel at 39th out of 57 countries and had the “biggest gap between the best and worst students.” (The U.S. is consistently below the international average.)
This will energize the anti-Israeli lobby in the U.S., which will question why we are pouring all this aid into the only democracy in the Middle East. Well, our aid package is military, not educational. It would be tragic to think we would be exporting our own failing educational system to Israel. The government-appointed Dorvat commission concluded that the problem in Israel is the poor quality of teaching and recommended that school principals should be given the authority to fire lousy teachers and give merit increases to the better ones. But as the Economist reported, “such moves have been blocked by Israel's two teachers' unions with a series of long strikes over the past few years.”
It has been said that the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers. But this has to be understood in the context of all those studies in recent years that have concluded that principals are the single most important factor in promoting school reforms. The subliminal message here is that the principal — the boss — needs to have the authority to hire and fire. That's essentially what the Dorvat commission concluded.
Anyone in business understands this. In my earlier years I was a boss. I was responsible for budgeting, recruiting and hiring the best possible employees. We were responsible for their training and getting the best of them into an executive continuity pool. If they failed, we were responsible for their improvement or firing them. We were held accountable for results.
Principals are no different. They need that authority. This is why in February 2007, Hernando Today published a column in which I endorsed school-based management, and in the same year, published a piece where it was argued that military schools — yes, Department of Defense schools — whose kids outscore their public school peers — are the epitome of school site management. (With schools all over the globe, such as Korea and Guam, goals could hardly be achieved by top down management.) But it needs to be recognized that the military expects parents to be involved in their kid's education. Civilian parents need to make the same commitment. Far too many are failures as role models for their children, making it virtually impossible for school site management to work or for teachers to be effective.
The notion of market based accountability is taking hold in large cities where the education systems have been total failures. In New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced in 2002 in a state of the city speech that the city's 1,450 principals would become independent CEO's and run their schools as small enterprises! (A bit theatrical, but the mayor is a successful billionaire. He must know something.) He dissolved the city's 32 school districts and phased out failing schools in favor of smaller more manageable schools. This is necessary for effective on site management. The idea of creating new schools with new educators is to create a new culture of success. In essence the system is getting rid of those who are failing. (But the union is doing their thing. Teacher's salaries have gone up 43 percent.)
In a stunning Jan. 24 article, the Chicago Tribune reported that Chicago Public Schools could fire hundreds of teachers and their principals next fall, “replacing them with better-trained or better-performing educators…” This has been years in the making. In 1995, Mayor Richard M. Daley took over the public school system — after the legislature gave up — and here he is, slogging on years later with some signs of success. Test scores are improving and graduation rates are up, yet it is still a struggle. But we need to understand this in the context of time. Way back on Nov. 8, 1987, Secretary of Education William J. Bennett said Chicago's public schools were the worst in the nation and that parents should consider private schools for their children!
And he was quite prescient when he foretold the need for strong mayoral leadership and dynamic principals when he explained, “It would take a man or woman of steel to clean it up.” Accountability with authority may well be the wave of the future. Innovative new school development initiatives will require educrats to take an uncomfortable amount of risk — and there will be failures along the way. Moreover, it's going to take a long time.
An adviser to the British government, Michael Barber, observed that Britain “has changed pretty much every aspect of education policy … often more than once. ... You name it; it's been changed and sometimes changed back. The only thing that hasn't changed has been the outcome…”
So we are not alone. Our spending has doubled in the past 15 years, and we can't even solve the high school drop out problem, much less properly educate those kids who hang on for a diploma.
John Reiniers, a regular columnist for Hernando Today, lives in Spring Hill. |
