As school year kicks off, education system said to be down thousands of teachers

As the academic school year began on Friday, the education system is facing a shortfall of thousands of teachers that has yet to be filled, creating severe problems in schools around the country.

Although official numbers are not available, figures cited by various sources indicated that the manpower crisis in the education system remains acute and will have a serious impact on educational standards.

Ran Erez, chairman of the Secondary School Teachers’ Association, told The Times of Israel that the elementary school system is missing some 3,000 teaching staff. The high school system faces a staffing shortfall of some 20 percent of positions, although he did not provide an absolute number for that statistic.

In an interview last week with Channel 12, Education Minister Yoav Kisch gave far lower figures for the shortfall in teaching manpower, and said there were just 1,500 teachers missing out of a total of some 250,000 teachers throughout the country’s different state school systems.

A report by Channel 12 on Wednesday said that the shortfall is currently 1,365 teachers, including 910 in the regular school system, 421 teachers in the special education system, and 34 in pre-schools.

Figures presented in the Knesset Education, Culture, and Sport Committee on August 14 also pointed to a far more severe shortage than the one described by Kisch.

During that hearing, acting director general of the Education Ministry Meir Shimoni told the committee that the system as a whole lacked 3,379 teachers, including 2,520 teachers in the state system, 784 teachers in the special education system, and 75 pre-school teachers.

A spokesperson for the Education Ministry was unable to explain the discrepancy in the numbers presented by Shimoni during the committee hearing earlier this month and the numbers mentioned by Kisch last week.

One of the problems in identifying the true shortfall in teaching staff is that some school principals are fed up with reporting on the issue to the Education Ministry. At the same time, the definition of who counts as a qualified teacher is also very vague, Prof. Dan Ben-David of the Shoresh Institution for Socioeconomic Research and Tel Aviv University said.

According to Ben-David, many schools have instructors qualified to teach a specific subject teaching classes in entirely different disciplines, making it unclear as to whether there is a lack of teaching manpower in those subjects.

Ben-David said that schools face particular difficulties finding teachers for science, math, and English, often using teachers qualified to teach other disciplines for those subjects.

Those positions are especially difficult to fill since people with those skills can often find higher paying work in the private sector, he said.

Due to the shortage of teachers, some schools have cut entire subjects from their curriculum, while others will have teachers teaching two classes together, the recent Channel 12 report said. Other schools have employed teachers who do not have formal teaching qualifications.

Although the focus in recent days on problems within the education system has been on the low pay received by teachers and the threat of strikes by the Secondary School Teachers’ Association, Ben-David insisted that the bigger problem not being addressed is the poor quality of education in Israel.

“Our kids aren’t receiving the basic tools to work in a modern economy or to understand the primary workings of a liberal democracy,” said the professor.

He identified the lack of a clearly defined, standardized core curriculum as a particular problem, saying that many schools are free to determine the curriculum themselves.

The quality of teachers is also a severe problem.

In the 2013 International Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) exams, which test adult suitability for the job market, Israeli teachers came third from last in comparison to teachers from other OECD countries.

Another major problem is the high level of bureaucracy in the Israeli school system, including an incredibly difficult process to fire bad teachers.

Ben-David also said that the ongoing failure to calibrate the high school diploma exams makes it difficult to determine if educational standards are rising or not. The fact that schools themselves control a certain percentage of the high school diploma grades makes it harder for universities to accurately gauge pupils’ educational competence.

“The primary problem that is not on the agenda is that the education our children are receiving is the worst in the developed world in terms of math, science, and reading.”

“When half of the children in the country are getting a third-world education, and when those children come from the fastest growing sectors of the population, educational and economic problems are only going to get worse.”