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With the increasing privitazation of the Israeli educational system, the educational gap between the weak and strong socioeconomic sectors is increasing.

In wake of the court petition of Israeli upper class parents, the District Court in Tel Aviv ruled last month that the Petah Tikvah Municipality and the Ministry of Education must publish the success rates in matriculation exams for the city’s schools. 

On the surface, it seems reasonable in a democratic society for  parents to receive reliable information about the academic achievements of their children in school. However, while this decision could have encouraged the schools, the parents and the pupils to work and improve the level of education, in reality, this decision represents just one more stage in the ongoing process of destroying the principle of public education. It is also a component of the ratings war among schools attempting to attract children of the elite.

This is one of the most sophisticated mechanisms created so far, in order to classify pupils by schools and to label schools as being weak or strong—a mechanism that will contribute towards privatization and the destruction of the public basis for equal education.

Those who always benefit from the publication of success rates in matriculation exams, such as in Tel Aviv, are the middle and upper classes. The weaker populations and their schools are forever the losers.

The right of the public to know is preserved only for the social elite, who look out solely for the interests of their children. Parents from the middle and upper classes are not concerned with schools with a particularly high level of weakened pupils.  According to the general understanding, the reason for this is that the higher number of weakened pupils there are in public schools, the lower the chance of the institutions, which are obligated to accept anyone, to attain high achievements. According to this logic, studying with a large number of weakened pupils is to essentially give up on excellence and resources. What every parent from the elite sector wants can be summarized in a few simple and cruel sentences: “I want my child (and only mine) to receive the best possible education. To achieve this, I will find a school without the weak. In such a school, it is possible to achieve particularly high results.”

The national competition for select places, whether schools or “classes of excellence,” resulted in two parallel phenomena. On the one hand, a concentration of the local elite in select schools, and on the other an ongoing weakening—almost destruction—of schools tagged as weak, or in which a majority of the students are from weakened populations. There is not one case in which the right of the public to know has served as a tool to raise the level of academic achievements of these local schools, or resulted in a turning point for the benefit of the weakened. On the contrary, the gaps have constantly and consistently grown wider.

Every public school, which comprises a majority of schools in Israel, is seemingly obligated to receive a certain percentage of weakened students. However, in the big cities this minimum exists in reality as a maximum percentage ceiling for weakened students. A school competing for the children of elite will do everything possible to reject weakened pupils, as they will lower the success rate. These are schools that do not believe in the ability of children from weakened communities to attain academic achievements and do not want a population unable to pay for the privatized education.

The minute a school aspires to achieve a respectable spot in this club, it will prevent entrance of pupils suspected of being weak, or will cause them to drop out in the rare case that they manage to infiltrate into the school. In order to achieve high percentages of success with an average level of effort, there is no choice but to prevent these students from “lowering” the success rate.

The competition becomes limited to a closed club of schools already labeled successful. Year after year they replicate themselves. The schools of the weakened sector have no chance of entering this closed, elitist club, as they receive all the other children, the most weakened.

The success of the parents of the elite in bringing about the publication of matriculation eligibility will not result in significant changes in the declining quality of public education. This is yet another nail in the coffin of equality in education.

The opposition of the Petah Tikvah Municipality and the Ministry of Education to acquiesce to the parents’ demand ostensibly prioritizes equality in education and the fear, which is justified, that publication of the results will result in an exodus of the elite from some of the schools, and hence the weakening of yet more schools. However, this actually reveals internal contradictions amongst educators (who still believe in equality in education). If you wish to fix a situation in which, time after time, the elite parents obtain their social desires—including through the use of courts—a strategy for change must be built: a majority of the resources, both municipal and national, must be devoted to schools serving the public of pupils from the weakened socioeconomic sectors, if only to equalize the resources in personnel and finances, from which the select schools enjoy due to the finances of their parents.

Throughout the years, as the pressure and nerve of the social elite grew, the gap in education has widened. This is due to, amongst other things, a constant decrease in budgetary allocations to public schools, an increasing number of students per class and the teachers in schools serving the weakened public working harder with fewer resources. Only someone who has never worked or bothered to learn about what happens in these communities and these schools can talk about equal competition.

To teach children of the elite means to teach those who in any case have alternative family resources and whom the class culture teaches to consume and demand teaching. The real challenge in teaching is to teach and educate children with the belief that they are all equal, with no resources, and with huge educational gaps. If there was fair competition, the weakened schools in the weakened socioeconomic communities should win first place, if only due to the effort necessary to survive under current conditions.

There is no logic to the right of the public to know, when the concept “knowledge” does not provide equality but the ability to use knowledge only in order to select the best for the individual interests of the elite. It is clear that the weakened communities lack the knowledge and tools to fight for their rights. There is no need for in-depth thinking to understand that publishing the rating of achievements will hurt the weakened populations. Immediately following publication, just as after the starting gun in a 100 meter sprint, a competition will commence amongst parents of the elite to register their children to select schools, where there will be a flood of requests unlike to the weak sector schools.

Who loses in this competition? The socioeconomically weak children lose. The relational gap already exists. The exclusive schools will require entrance demands.

From this moment begins the double process of labeling the weakened schools. Not only have the elite already tagged them, but the weakened parents will say to themselves that what they receive as a possibility are the less good schools. They will be disappointed already from the start. That is to say, they will give less trust and opportunity for the staff of teachers to prove that they can succeed with the students. The teaching staff will also internalize this label, and it will create conflict between the staff and the disappointed parents. Nothing good can come of this.

Time after time, in visits to weakened neighborhoods, and in schools located within these areas, the mantra repeats itself: lack of faith, the illusion of being able to free a child from weakness by moving the child to the successful “North,” where s/he is still labeled. The community has no faith in the school. The school has no faith in the community. So, with or without the publication of the rating, everyone acts according to the social given. They replicate the educational-social oppression, and drown in the despair of inability and disbelief in their ability to change and be changed.

The right of the public to know is only seemingly a universal and not class right. Against the individual right to know must be placed an alternative: the right of the weakened community to know. This is in order that the community can improve conditions in its school, and not in those of the elite. In a weakened community, the ability of the students to survive is minimal. The right and obligation of the community to know, to be involved in what occurs in school and within the community in order to change its situation and strengthen its belief in its children and to support the school staff within the existing social-educational crisis.

The right of the individual to know is a liberal right related to the belief in the individual and her own powers to compete in the open educational market. The right of the community to know is a right of the community to organize and be involved in educational activities, in order to preserve the right of equal education for all children in the community.