Every year, the same data regarding the recruitment crisis in education is published, and yet – nothing changes. Is the issue the lack of the profession’s prestige or is it that the centralized system prevents actual solutions?

Every year, Israel experiences seasonal phenomena like the first rain, the bird migration, the bloom of the almond trees and the annual article about the acute shortage of teachers in the Israeli education system.

How is it that every year the same data on staff shortages in certain geographic areas and certain school subjects gets published, alongside the same tired slogans about the disparities between teachers’ training and educational needs, and nothing ever changes?

Could it be that the real issue is the inability to properly define the issue?

An article was recently published claiming that the root of the problem is the profession’s “prestige”. Supposedly, the profession of teaching is not valued enough in Israeli society. This still leaves the question: what caused the decrease in the profession’s status?

The most important point is that the problem is not educational, which is why education and training professionals cannot understand it, much less find solutions.

What the problem is, is the management of a scarce resource – which is how such things are commonly defined in economics. The teacher workforce is a resource like any other –  a human resource. Every budding economist knows that whenever a resource is managed centrally by the government – from milk products or eggs (that sometimes disappear off our shelves), through hospital beds and electricity or communications service providers (recall the prices when the Bezeq company had a monopoly), and up to teachers and manpower – the result is always a shortage. When government distributes, controls prices and salaries and determines quotas for places, services or products, a shortage is formed. It is a direct result.

In Communist Russia, people starved to death, not because there were not enough bakeries, but because states do not have the ability to allocate bread effectively to all their citizens. While some places would be throwing out mountains of bread, people died of starvation in others. Analogous to our issue, some places, such as the Arab sector, have a huge surplus of teaching staff, while in other places, such as cities in the Central District, classes are combined to make up for a deficit of teachers. In some subjects, such as Judaism, there is an overabundance of training courses, while subjects like science, mathematics and English suffer a massive shortage.

The worst solution is to waste even more money on training courses or on system-wide salaries. If the issue is centralized management, the solution is decentralization. The only mechanism that ‘knows’ how to allocate a resource in a relatively efficient manner is the market, because it comprises countless sensors on the ground that relay information about surplus and shortage. The State will never be able to ascertain the culinary preferences of its entire citizenry but thousands of food businesses learn the purchasing patterns of their local consumers and respond to their varying demands.

The equivalent in education of such small businesses is school principals – they know which teachers they are in need of and how they can be recruited – whether they should prioritize high salaries over other resources, add the recruitment of teachers from other subjects for part time jobs, or maybe take on board excelling education students who want to work while they complete their degrees. There are many solutions that principals are currently prevented from utilizing because of the Ministry of Education’s centralization. There is no need to privatize the schools. In the vast majority of countries around the world, teachers are employed by the schools or by the local authorities, but some still suffer shortages because of collective agreements or top-down management. On the other hand, there are education systems in which public schools have the autonomy to recruit their own teachers, set their employment conditions and fire them if necessary. Public services are not obligated to be centralized.

Personal contracts were meant to represent a partial solution to this issue, but Education Minister Yoav Kisch shot them down for fear of getting in trouble with the head of the Teachers’ Union Yaffa Ben David – who benefits the most from the system’s centralization. Like the Ministers of Education before him, Kisch chose dishonor, and he will, in the future, have (more) war.

So when the Minister of Education says “we will find a comprehensive, systemic solution” and establishes another committee, you can be sure that next winter you’ll once again the see same articles and hear the same familiar excuses and rehashed solutions.

First published in Hebrew in Israel National News (Arutz Sheva)