Section archive - Formal Education

The first week of the approaching school year will be devoted to teaching students the importance of tolerance, fighting racism, and preventing violence, Israel Education Minister Naftali Bennett announced Thursday. The announcement follows the violent events over the summer, including the stabbing murder of an Israeli teenager at the Jerusalem Gay Pride Parade and the arson that claimed the lives of a Palestinian toddler and his father in the village of Duma.

Private tutoring (PT) is becoming a worldwide phenomenon. In Israel too, about a third of elementary school students participate in PT. Based on sociological and school quality considerations, we examined school characteristics that are associated with PT intensity at school. The data encompassed a random state wide sample of 389 Israeli elementary schools collected by the Ministry of Education in 2012.

This paper is a response to Haim Shaked’s (“Israel's Official Policy with Regard to Teaching Evolution in Public Schools”, IJJER 7, July 2014) recent call for further attention to the issue of how evolution, and specifically Jewish views of evolution, should be taught in Israeli public schools. In this article we will present initial findings from a pilot project conducted in 2014. We will also share some of the dilemmas we confronted along the path of constructing and executing the pilot. While we agree with Shaked regarding the pressing need to address the issue of Jewish views of evolution within the Israeli school system, we offer a different approach as to how to best accomplish this end.

What does it take to achieve excellence in Hebrew education? A willingness on behalf of the leaders and community to engage in a critical examination of an already successful program. At the Epstein School in Atlanta, we had developed a reputation as a school with a highly successful Hebrew immersion program. And yet, internally, we knew we could do better; there were gaps in achievement that we struggled to address, and we needed the perspective of an outside expert to help give us a bigger picture on the program’s goals and implementation. Many schools would question why we spent time and resources to fix what isn’t broken when there are so many demands on our plates. This article chronicles how we embarked on the journey to ensure our students receive the best immersion services we can provide. We came away with a profound sense of renewed commitment to our values, identity and mission statement.