The crumbling infrastructure of a school in the Naqab/Negev.
Like the majority of students who started school in Israel last week, Arab students set off with the usual nerves, excitement, and dread associated with the first day of school. However, unlike their Jewish peers and unbeknownst to them, the cards have already been stacked against these Arab students. As has become custom, they will begin the school year in overcrowded, dilapidated classrooms and with fewer resources. Fortunately, they are still too young to realize that their state spends $1000 less on each of them annually than it does on their Jewish counterparts.
Perhaps some of these students will pass by Jewish schools, asking their parents why they look so much nicer than their own. How will these parents explain to their children, who have not yet learned to differentiate humans based on race, ethnicity, or nationality, that their schools are not as nice simply because they are Arab.
According to the Ministry of Education itself, the state spent 35-68% more per Jewish high school student than it did on Arab students of the same age and socioeconomic group during the 2013-2014 academic year.
The state has continued to spend less on its Arab students despite disparities in academic performance and socioeconomic indicators. In 1996, then Minister of Education Amnon Rubinstein attempted to mitigate these gaps through the creation of the Arab Education Council. The Council, however, quickly fell out of activity, with most of its members resigning. MK Yousef Jabareen (Hadash) called on the current Minister, Naftali Bennet, to re-activate the council. He has not done so. Nor has he even responded to the request.
One of the most egregious manifestations of the state’s discrimination in educational budgeting is Haifa’s Hiwar school, where one can literally find tens of students studying in the hallways because of overcrowding in the classroom. The school, which has 300 students despite having a capacity of 180, experiences annual flooding as a result of a lack of funding for infrastructural development. Meanwhile, the high moisture and disintegrating structures pose a constant danger to students and staff. In 2013, in response to complaints from the community, including from the Mossawa Center, the Haifa municipality pledged to build a new school for the students. Four years later, it has built no such school, instead investing in the construction of a new wing in the nearby Herzl school. The Mossawa Center, in cooperation with the Haifa University Legal Clinic and the Social Development Association for Arabs in Haifa, has initiated a legal process to secure justice for the Hiwar school and its students.
In a similar vein, although 30% of its residents are Arab, the city of Nazareth Illit has refused to open an educational institution for its Arab students, forcing them to commute to Nazareth. The Mossawa Center, in cooperation with ACRI and the affected families, have appealed to the administrative court against the Ministry of Education and the city of Nazareth Illit.
Discrimination in state funding also shows itself in the state’s approach to private schools. Israel’s thirty-two church-run schools, which serve both Christians and Muslims, fall under the same category as Orthodox Jewish schools. Nonetheless, where Orthodox Jewish schools receive 100% of their funding from the state, church schools only receive 34% of their funding from the state. After a long struggle led by the High Follow-Up Committee, in cooperation with Injaz, the Mossawa Center, and the Arab Mayors Association, the government provided an allocation of NIS 130 million to the church schools. This one-time allocation, however, still leaves major gaps in state funding for private schools.
As a result of such discrimination, and despite recent improvements, Arab academic performance remains dismal. In 2015, 50% of Arab students, compared to 62% of Jewish students obtained matriculation certificates. The statistics are even more dismal in certain subjects, where only 14% of Arab students, compared to 58% of Jewish students, passed the English matriculation exam, for example.
Several of the articles published over the past week cited socioeconomic disparities as the cause for the gaps in educational performance, drawing blame away from the state’s glaringly unequal budgeting. This, however, flies in the face of a report published by the Ministry of Finance itself which drew attention to the “major influence” the education sector has on income gaps. This, of course, makes sense if one considers the crucial correlation between educational achievement and individual earning potential. Resolution 922 for the socioeconomic development of the Arab sector seemed to take this into account, calling on the Ministry of Education to implement differential budgeting, i.e. budgeting based on need. The Minster of Education, Naftali Bennet, however, has refused to fulfill this obligation, instead sitting on NIS 1.4 billion annually in order to avoid increasing funding to Arab students. The Mossawa Center approached the Director of the Ministry of Education, Shmuel Abuav, demanding that the Ministry implement the budget immediately.
In general, Resolution 922 has failed to fulfill its promises, with only a small portion of the funds implemented almost two years after the resolution’s passage. Consequently, the poverty rate amongst Arab families remains at just over fifty percent of the population. Thus, whether socioeconomic status determines educational performance or the reverse, the state continuously refuses to proportionately invest in either.
While discrimination against citizens of any age undermines the basic principles that uphold democracy, it is particularly shameful to discriminate against children based on their ethnicity, religion, or nationality. Thus the Mossawa Center calls on the Israeli government, namely the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Finance to distribute their budgetary allocations equitably. With such a move unlikely without external pressure, we also call on the international community to hold the state of Israel accountable for refusing to fulfill its commitments to uphold democratic principles and equal rights for all of its citizens.
Please contact [email protected] for additional information.
For more information on disparities in higher education, please see our most recent press release on the matter.
