Education System – 1999-2000

The first part of this section presents the main characteristics of enrollment and calls attention to major processes and trends. Afterwards, the discussion focuses on the system’s two main organizational settings: the class and the school.

The growth and development of these two settings have important budgetary implications. The class is the decisive unit in budgeting of the education system; the number of classes is the factor that determines the cost of the system.

The second part of this section discusses class size in its educational, organizational, and economic aspects. This part presents the distribution of classes by size and various characteristics of the population and uses this context to focus on the implications of reducing class size.

The third part of the section discusses school size in several respects. Various factors affect the size of schools and they rarely lend themselves to rapid change. The figures and discussions presented below shed light on various aspects of the issue.

This paper appears as a chapter in the Center’s annual publication, Israel’s Social Services 1999-2000, Yaakov Kop (editor).