A Vision and Set of Recommendations for the Israeli Education System

Following the social protest movement of the summer of 2011, several focus groups came together with the aim of formulating concrete demands and recommendations for socioeconomic policy changes.  This chapter relates to “protest documents” that were formulated by four groups and focuses on their recommendations in the area of education.  An analysis of these documents reveals important differences between them as well as no small measure of agreement regarding promising policy directions.  The goal is to distill policy proposals that are likely to contribute to an improvement in academic achievements while narrowing gaps between ethnic groups and social strata amongst Israeli pupils.  In addition, the aim is to articulate an educational vision based on these proposals, to identify the central common recommendations and to estimate the costs of their implementation.

This paper appears in the Center’s annual publication State of the Nation Report – Society, Economy and Policy 2011-2012.