Implementation of the Etzioni Commission Recommendations

It produced a series of proposals for raising academic qualifications of teachers, restricting entry of unqualified teachers into the education system, and granting teachers a substantial pay increase. Along with these, there were also recommendations for far-reaching changes in the Israeli education system, aimed at remodeling it in line with a new conception of the school as a community education center open over extended hours, rather than merely an institute of formal education.

The main part of this paper is devoted to a discussion of the policy implications of the proposals. The main problem pointed up by the study is that if the framework of government allocation to education remains unchanged, the additional expenditure required for implementing these recommendations must come at the expense of other educational programs.

An additional aspect analyzed in this work is the issue of geographic variations in teaching standards. The paper finds that the collective agreements reached following the Etzioni Commission “distributed” salary increases uniformly, even though they could have been allocated so as to constitute a greater incentive for experienced teachers to transfer from their present posts to more distant schools.

This paper appears as a chapter in the Center’s annual publication, Israel’s Outlays for Human Services 1984, and is available upon request.