We are tired of band-aids: it is time to revolutionize education
Those who do come to teach find themselves with very little room for educational action and feel like pieces on a chessboard that the Ministry of Education moves to convey messages and achieve results.
Just before the start of the school year, the Ministry of Finance pulls a rabbit out of the hat in the form of the option to employ teachers under personal contracts.
This is a program that already existed in the past, failed, and is now being tried again with slight updates. What is the good news?
Principals deserve for the state to enter the trenches with them and help them bring additional teachers into the system. In a situation where thousands of teachers are missing, principals need additional tools and flexibility that will allow them to attract good people to teaching. This is, of course, too late, too little, and very complex to implement. And yet, there is a helping hand extended to principals here. But that is about where the good news ends.
Because this program, just like others, is a band-aid trying to stop the collapse of the education system. This is not the way, even if we set aside the significance of a program that brings teachers into the system without a teaching certificate and could harm the status and conditions of veteran teachers. The real issue is that the story is not really about the salary. Teachers certainly deserve a high salary from their very first day given the important role and heavy responsibility they carry on their shoulders, but salary is not a magic solution that will solve the problems of the education system.
The education system must break the habit of constantly trying to bring more and more teachers into the system. In Israeli demographics, there will be no end to this; we will constantly need more and more teachers, which will lead to the erosion of the status of the teaching profession and inevitably to the entry of less qualified teachers into the field.
These teachers enter an outdated, bureaucratic system with a predatory organizational culture that does not allow them to feel a sense of meaning, and therefore they leave very quickly.
We need to change the equation and bring about a situation where there is less demand and less need for bringing in new teachers. For this, a revolution in education is needed that changes the structure of the system, and it starts with the question: how do we learn?
Instead of holding 45-minute lessons in a classroom of more than 30 students and a teacher, we must move to flexibility at all levels — group size, lesson length, and the way we learn.
Those who do come to teach find themselves with very little room for real educational action and feel like pieces on a chessboard that the Ministry of Education moves from place to place to convey messages and achieve results. A decentralized system, where the authority over budget management, learning formats, and the organization of the daily schedule is in the hands of the field, will allow educational teams to be leaders and take ownership of the teaching processes, and thus restore meaning and relevance to the work.
Our children will also get to enjoy a different kind of learning, diverse and relevant to our days, and the school will return to being a place worth coming to.
And therefore, it is our responsibility as a public to call on our leaders and tell the next Prime Minister: we are tired of band-aids. We give you the mandate to revolutionize education, and to ensure that our children have a better education and the State of Israel has a secured future.
Dr. Gali Nahari is the CEO of the Fourth Quarter movement, formerly Deputy Director General of the Ministry of Education.
