21 - Israel

Summary

Israel is a young state characterized by a mosaic of different social, ethnic, cultural, and religious groups and awareness of topics of justice and equality. As a reflection of Israel’s heterogeneous society, the educational system is subdivided into segregated sectors, based on ethnicity as well as cultural-social grounds that yield different educational outcomes. Based on a large-scale dataset and reports, we demonstrate that the differences between the educational sectors should be attributed mainly to socioeconomic factors, rather than ethnic or religious differences only. Many efforts have been devoted to decreasing these gaps, ranging from revised state policies to specific interventions. Nevertheless, the socioeconomic gaps persist. Given the diversity of Israel’s population, we suggest moving away from a standardized approach that pursues distributive justice, which addresses educational gaps as a deficit in disadvantaged groups, into an approach that pursues procedural justice, which can be implemented through an edumetric approach. This edumetric approach calls for a more sophisticated approach to students’ evaluation that explores new ways to identify those students whose academic abilities are not yet represented in their current academic achievements, and finding new ways to turn their personal capital into positive development.