If we needed a litmus test to demonstrate the sorry state of our education system – the recently published report on the state of education is precisely it.
What should concern us is not the report’s findings, but rather the Ministry of Education’s flawed methods for measuring, reviewing, and evaluating schools. As the adage goes, “what gets measured gets managed”: what the system views as of real import, it makes an effort to measure and review the implementation of, at times even beyond its declared goals.

So, what is of real importance to the system? Not learning, apparently. According to the report, no subject other than native language was measured in terms of acquisition of the relevant knowledge or involved skills. Similarly, recent years have shown that other reviewed subjects featured instability, infrequency, widespread cancelation of exams for various reasons, and inconsistency.

What was diligently measured? School climate. Teachers and students responded to queries about their social situation, their satisfaction with teaching methods, their sense of security, the level of violence in the school and so on. Even “cyber and digital” literacy was reviewed by getting answers to such subjective statements as “I can successfully find the information I need for school on the internet”.

The issue of school climate is extremely important – indeed, a healthy climate is a crucial precondition for students’ development – but with all that, it is only the substrate on which learning, the goal of the system, is enabled. Measuring school climate alone is akin to an agronomist evaluating a vineyard or orchard by measuring only the soil quality or amount of watering, without examining the yield of its fruit.

This distortion comes from the erroneous viewpoint that has seeped through the system, according to which, knowledge is not important in the 21st century because of our easy access to information. If students can “google” any question, why teach them at all? They only need to feel good, suffer no violence, “learn to think”, conduct research on their own and report in surveys if they can use the internet.

There is not enough space to describe the damage inflicted on the education system by this conception, which transformed post-modernist, alternative education principles into the system’s core values. Do only what you like, learn only what feels right and arouses your curiosity – and report back how happy you are.

Another reason for the Ministry of Education’s subpar measurements and evaluation is the anxiety surrounding competition. In a system that exalts feelings of stability and well-being, any comparison of results or G-d forbid making those results transparent is stressful and destabilizing. There are, in fact, ways to handle such anxiety. For instance, by evaluating a wide spectrum of skills and subjects or giving schools the choice to be evaluated on additional subjects that reflect their specialties. However, the Israeli Authority for Measurement and Evaluation in Education instead reached the farfetched conclusion that the best answer to the anxiety about revealing grades was to cancel them altogether; send school principals verbal assessments alone; and publicize only a small portion of them. The students were poured out with the bathwater.

As this authority does evaluate students’ digital literacy, the digital condition of the system itself should be considered as well: it is preposterous that, in this day and age, the system is evaluated by printed tests, so that in October 2024, we are being supplied with data from 2022. What system can improve when its evaluations arrive two years after the data was collected? How relevant are the results?

The Ministry of Education is one of the most centralized in the world and should be stepping back and allowing more autonomy in practically every regard. In one area alone, though, it does less than it should, and that is evaluation and assessment. The Ministry sets the goals, and can be expected to assess how well schools reach them. As citizens who generously finance the Ministry, we should be able to get a glimpse of what its yields look like.

First published in Israel Hayom (“The Sorry State of Education” 27.10.2024)