Fighting crime through education in the Arab sector - analysis

• Author: ISMAEL ABU-SAAD
• Published date: 09 October 2021
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

From the very beginning, the Arab education system in Israel has suffered from blatant and institutionalized inequality, expressed in a triangle of discrimination; first, in unequal allocation of budgets; second, unequal representation in the higher echelons of the system; and third, inequality in the curriculum.

First, budgetary inequality: The budgets allocated to the Arab school system are far smaller than those for the Jewish system and fall very short of satisfying its most basic needs. According to The Marker, the average investment in an Arab high school student is 40% lower than that in the Jewish state-religious stream, and 20% below the figure for the Jewish state-secular stream. Education Ministry data reveal that the Arab system is allocated lower budgets across the board – fewer days of staff training, a smaller investment in special programs and in informal education, fewer hours of supervision and lower budgets to support weak pupils, alongside a huge shortage of elementary physical infrastructure, computers, science labs and libraries.

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Second, the under-representation of Arabs in senior positions in the education system – including supervisors, management and planners. Prof. Daphna Golan-Agnon, who studied the inequality in education, notes that you can count the number of Arab senior officials in the Education Ministry on the fingers of one hand, and that there are no Arabs among the ministry's decision-makers and planners. This exclusion of Arabs from the senior echelons of the Education Ministry has a severe impact on the system's performance and on its success in empowering Israel's Arab citizens.

Arabs ostensibly are present, but in reality are absent from the highest levels of the ministry, where decisions are made. For example, there is not a single Arab heading a district; only recently was an Arab appointed as deputy director-general of the ministry and head of the Technological Education Administration, even though there are many Arabs with the qualifications to fill these positions.

Here it is important to note that since the early 1980s there have been various proposals to establish an autonomous Arab Education Administration, in parallel to the Jewish National-Religious Education Administration, and with an appropriate budget and staff. But these ideas, whether promoted by the Higher...