Teachers strike / Someone must call for help

The education system needs help, to save the teachers from their distress, to save children from ignorance. Israel needs help to avoid defeat. But nobody writes that way anymore - calling for "help" - it reeks of mothballs, and the writer who does so is considered a nerd.

A state where 45,000 teachers are not teaching and 550,000 pupils are not going to school should be declared a disaster area. After 45 days, with the end nowhere in sight, we risk getting used to it and preparing for a long hibernation which will continue into the summer. Life goes on without education as well, the strike has become routine and what else is new. Education is going down the drain and everyone is talking about Annapolis.

Yesterday they returned from Annapolis, intoxicated with nothing. Will they now have a few minutes for more than a letter to the newspaper? What chutzpah to bother the prime minister on his return from an exhausting trip. After all, it's much easier to hold endless, fruitless negotiations with the Palestinians than to talk to the teachers, with whom negotiations will be concluded before the end of 2008, with any luck.

Yesterday I returned from the national journalists' conference in Eilat, where I met a woman who introduced herself as Ayala Segal, a civics teacher in a local high school. The veteran teacher poured her heart out: What can we do, she asked. I devote my entire life to work, to my students, and now I feel humiliated and betrayed. What do they know there, in Jerusalem and the treasury, of my work, what reform are they demanding? In recent years they slashed and cut yet they still have complaints. First let them return what they took from us, then let's talk about reform, she said.

Indeed, what chutzpah to involve a prime minister in a teacher's hardships.

It would also be chutzpah to brief a prime minister on the academic achievements of Israeli students nationwide, to tell him that grades are plummeting in all the tests, in all fields of knowledge. This fall, without parachutes, ends with crushed limbs. How predictable.

It would be chutzpah, but not the worst kind. That is reserved for Ronit Tirosh, former director general of the Education Ministry. Tirosh and her minister Limor Livnat hacked away at education for five years. They stole seven classroom hours a week from every child, built no classrooms, and stuffed children into the existing ones. They sliced NIS 4 billion off the education budget, and now they stand whining in the education wasteland they created, wailing for the current education minister to resign.

No "reform" is necessary. The state must return what it pillaged - that would be reform enough.

Yet the teachers are told that the number of weekly instruction hours and number of pupils per classroom are not their business, but the government's, as if the ministers are the ones teaching in those classrooms. Treasury officials have implied that the teachers were greedy and were only fighting for their wages. Ayala Segal of Eilat was less interested in money than in her ability to teach and educate in decent conditions.

But it would really be impertinent to expect Olmert to meet Segal's representatives after such a tiring week. Who does she think she is, soccer coach Avram Grant? Jerry Seinfeld?

Education Minister Yuli Tamir should not have to resign alone. She is not the only one responsible. And yet, when Ehud Olmert is busy and Defense Minister Ehud Barak is mum and Finance Minister Roni Bar-on is speaking, someone has to volunteer to shake things up and shout - help! Perhaps Tamir has no choice.