ABC for educational strategy

In both Israel and the world in general, education seems to be deteriorating. But it seems to be deteriorating faster in Israel than elsewhere. School-age students here do worse on standardized tests than their peers in other countries. The gaps in achievement between different social groups seem to be increasing. Our teachers are underpaid and they suffer from low social status. Families are leaving the country, among other reasons, because they want to provide their children with a better education.

So it seems. But there is other evidence, hard to quantify, that points in another direction. Many university teachers, for example, will tell you that students here are superior to those they encounter teaching abroad. More than that: Experienced university faculty often report that students have been improving. Their horizons are broader and they write better papers.

Seems strange: Students at primary and secondary schools have been getting worse, and those at universities have been getting better? How can that be?

One reason could be that many students now attend the four-year colleges, so they don't surface at universities. But universities absorb the same fraction of every age-group cohort they did a generation ago. What else? Maybe students today obtain their knowledge outside the school system. Nowadays, all students are conversant with computers and the Internet, and know how to research, rewrite and submit papers using the tools computers make available. The idea that the general level has improved is borne out by the observation that the students who have improved are the average students; truly exceptional students were just as good a generation ago.

Of course, that last observation makes our school system look even worse: Students are getting their essential knowledge elsewhere. We need to find out for sure where exactly this knowledge stems from; we need to specify the relationship between what is learned at school and what is learned outside school, since today so much education is drawn from the media and the Internet. We need to look closely at why our school-age students are doing so badly at standardized tests, but we also need to find out whether these tests are really informative about the people they test.

We need to be able to rigorously sift through good ideas for education that are being deployed in other parts of the world, so we can figure out what would be helpful here in Israel. We have no organization that studies education policy elsewhere and tells us how it could be applied here. Education schools at universities tend to study long-range effects, while government bodies often focus on repairing immediate problems. What's required is an institution that adopts a longer-range view than the government, and a more immediate, practical perspective than that of schools of education. We need a center that analyzes what is happening around the world in the field of education and presents it to decision makers and professionals in Israel. Such a center should design alternative strategic plans for decision makers, and work closely with government, teachers, students and parents to plan our educational future. We need a center for strategic planning in education.

An example: Analysts at the McKinsey consulting firm conducted a study to determine and compare why students in some countries seem to test much better than their peers elsewhere. They found out that neither class size nor teacher pay are significant variables. Rather, the single biggest factor in student success is the social prestige teachers enjoy. The McKinsey study also noted that this prestige reflects two factors: how selective teaching is as a profession (i.e. how hard it is to become a teacher), and how much effort and financial investment a society makes in training its teachers. If you want to spend money wisely, spend it on training teachers. How can we effectively apply such an insight in our society without methodical strategic planning?

Next week the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, together with Hakol Chinuch and the Jerusalem Municipality, will bring together a dozen innovative educational managers from all over the world to discuss education strategy. We are looking forward to this international conference because we want to listen to reformers and experts to learn how they made education reforms happen. We see it as the opening event in a campaign to set up a national center for educational strategy.

At Van Leer, we stand ready to help build such a national center for educational strategy. We believe that such a center, like policy institutions such as the Rand Corporation or the Brookings Institution, should be private, financed by the private sector for the public good. Government cannot be the only public space in which citizens fulfill their public obligations. Our mission at Van Leer is to deploy private funds for public purposes.

A center for educational strategy is a top national priority. We believe that our country needs such a resource urgently so it can meet the challenges of providing equal educational opportunities for all in a world of multiplying technologies.

Prof. Gabriel Motzkin is director of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute.