Education in Israel

Israel has to devote such a large part of its bugdget to  defence that other sectors are short-changed.  Voluntary organizations such as World ORT help take up some of the slack

According to the OECD, in 2015 Israel was fifth from bottom in ranking students’ mathematics, science and reading levels. For expenditure per child at the secondary level, Israel fared even worse: fourth from bottom.

It is putting great strain on hard-working educators to expect them to produce skilled and knowledgeable students when no investment – either of money, of faith or of confidence – is made in their education.

Many students find themselves in extremely difficult life situations: unemployed or underemployed parents, language barriers, recent arrival in a new country, frightening security situation, living in the periphery and suffering from a lack of government investment in general.

Effectively, the Start-Up Nation will lose its reputation unless its education improves. To reverse the trend, meaningful and well-directed investment is needed. Of course, the government must take chief responsibility for this. But philanthropy must also play its part. This is where World ORT has a crucial role to play. Since our establishment in Israel 12 years ago, we have invested more than $100 million in working to reduce these gaps.

We have invested in communities in the country’s geographic and socioeconomic periphery. We have provided support to immigrants, non-Jews, strictly Orthodox Jews, Muslims, Druze, Bedouin and poorer Jewish communities. But what we are doing is a drop in the ocean. We need the wider, more sustained support of the state and world Jewry.

This crisis takes on more importance given the global rise in antisemitism. Education is the most effective way to combat hatred. This must begin from an early age.

Our schools in Latin America, Europe and the former Soviet Union are mixed Jewish and non-Jewish schools. Our non-Jewish students study Jewish history, culture and traditions, promoting increased understanding between children. We are partners in the Scholas program – Pope Francis’s initiative to encourage understanding and cooperation between youngsters of all backgrounds. We run Tikkun Olam programs and initiatives to support non-Jewish communities.

These are all geared toward providing not only an academic education, but also a social education, encouraging students to be good citizens of the world and promote Jewish values.

These aims – a strong Israel, a strong Diaspora and a strong reputation for Jews worldwide – are what ORT has been working toward for the past 139 years. As we approach our 140th anniversary, we will continue to strive to place the future in the hands of the next generation.

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Student-Loan Forgiveness: Moral Hazard on Steroids

Democrats appeal to people's self-entitlement with a massive income-redistribution scheme.

It’s almost impossible to maintain a current list of Democrat Party efforts to buy votes. “Free” health care, “free” college tuition, and reparations for slavery, Native Americans, and gay and lesbian couples are just the tip of the iceberg for a party that would also decriminalize sneaking into America, provide health care to illegal aliens, and raise taxes on middle-class America to pay for it, even when such proposals would blast an already unconscionable level of national debt further into the stratosphere. Yet the most pernicious pandering — courtesy of Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren — is the idea that $1.6 trillion of outstanding student-loan debt should simply be canceled.

“People are not truly free when they are unable to buy a home, start a family or pursue the career they want because they owe tens of thousands of dollars for the crime of getting an education,” Sanders declares. “This is why, as part of my proposal for a 21st Century Economic Bill of Rights, I have this week introduced legislation to free generations of Americans by canceling the $1.6 trillion in outstanding student loan debt.”

If a shamelessly suck-up proposal with the words “21st Century” attached to it has a familiar ring, it’s because “socialism of the 21st Century” was the term used by the late Hugo Chavez, who promised it put Venezuela on the road to utopia.

Sanders thought so too, as recently as 2011. “These days, the American dream is more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as Ecuador, Venezuela and Argentina, where incomes are actually more equal today than they are in the land of Horatio Alger,” he wrote. “Who’s the banana republic now?”

Certainly not Venezuela. It has devolved from a banana republic to a completely failed state.

In contrast to Sanders, Warren’s giveaway is more intricate. She would eliminate $50,000 in student-loan debt for every person with household income under $100,000, partially cancel debt for those with household incomes between $100,000 and $250,000, and make private student-loan debt eligible for cancellation — and also provide free college to everyone. In a tweet Warren called her plan “the kind of big, structural change we need to make sure our kids have opportunity in this country.”

Structural change? The same shopworn socialist/Marxist redistributionism that has produced “equality” — of misery and poverty — everywhere it’s been tried, is more like it.

How dishonest are Democrats? What could be more dishonest than the word “free” attached to any government proposal? Nothing is free, and the use of the word to describe any transfer of costs from one group of Americans to another is Orwellian doublespeak.

Moreover, it reeks of elitist contempt. Democrats are convinced a large percentage of Americans are either so bereft of common sense and economic acumen or so imbued with a sense of self-entitlement that they’ll climb aboard the socialist gravy train.

No doubt much of that contempt is derived from knowing that they themselves have heartily embraced the wholesale dumbing-down of America’s public-school system, where contempt for a nation in need of “fundamental change” has become an integral part of the curriculum.

Yet who’s kidding whom? There are two primary reasons that college students have accumulated $1.6 trillion of debt Democrat would “forgive.” First, all student-loan defaults are ultimately underwritten by the taxpayers, many of whom have never even sniffed the inside of a college classroom. Thus colleges can — and have — raised their costs with impunity: since 1985 tuition has increased at nearly quadruple the rate of inflation. Moreover, a large percentage of those increases have been dedicated to expanding college bureaucracies, whose costs rose at nearly twice the rate of teaching outlays between 1993 and 2007.

What kind of bureaucracies? Last April, Georgetown University President John DeGioia announced the creation of a Vice President for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. One month later, University of Rochester created the same position with the same title. Ivy League colleges Yale and Harvard also inflated their ranks of diversity “specialists,” all of whom are undoubtedly tasked with making their respective universities what DeGioia described as bastions of “racial justice” and “educational equity.”

Second, many students can’t pay off their loans because they can’t get good enough jobs to do so. “I was expected to make a $400 loan payment every month, but I had no money, no sustainable income,” stated Chad Albright, a graduate who fled to China to escape paying his $30,000 debt. “College ruined my life.”

Perhaps. Or perhaps obtaining a degree in public relations was a bad choice.

Yet maybe he wouldn’t have made that choice if colleges were required to publish data on student graduation rates, the level of debt they’ve accumulated, and what students earn after graduating — so potential enrollees know exactly what they’re getting before they go into debt. And maybe colleges wouldn’t be so expensive if they were required to underwrite a percentage of those student-loan defaults, largely engendered by majors that do virtually nothing to prepare students for real-world jobs.

Such truth in advertising coupled with market-based cost controls would produce genuine structural change. Yet for panderers like Sanders and Warren, what it wouldn’t do is far more important: it wouldn’t burnish their social justice warrior credentials.

Thus, both prefer preserving an utterly corrupt system and forcing the “rich” to pay for it.

Yet far worse is something few people talk about any more: moral hazard. Like their obsession with providing a “pathway to citizenship” for millions of people who entered the nation illegally — and making an utter mockery of those who have emigrated here the right way — Sanders and Warren would make a similar mockery of all those former students who have struggled to pay back the money they willingly borrowed.

In short, for nothing more than political gain, they would toss honor, integrity, and commitment to one’s legal obligations on the ash heap of history.

Unsurprisingly, they have their champions. “Student debt is a potent issue that has the potential to drive turnout and influence votes, in 2018 and beyond,” gush columnists Richard Eskow and Sean McElwee. “Individuals holding student debt may well decide which party will control the House of Representatives next session.”

Really? And then what? Columnist Dov Fischer sarcastically ups the morally hazardous ante for the rest of the “woke” Democrat contenders. “Howzabout a zero-percent candidate shooting up from the pack with this proposal: Buy off the whole American Middle Class by promising Home Mortgage Loan Forgiveness!” he writes.

Why not? And why stop there? How about car loans, credit card debt, or even one’s gambling losses at the race track? Isn’t it just as unfair that millions of Americans struggle to cover those costs? Once moral hazard is eliminated, shouldn’t any debt that engenders even the slightest iota of hardship be forgiven?

As our Nate Jackson has wryly noted, “Never get in a bidding war with a true socialist.”

No doubt. Moreover, don’t get into moral arguments with people who believe the accumulation of power — by any means necessary — constitutes the totality of their “moral” universe.

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Why are Australia school standards still falling?

Despite all the policy differences in the election, there was little to distinguish between the two major parties on the subject of increasing school funding. They only differ in the extent: the Coalition promised a large spending increase, and Labor promised an even larger one.

But neither of those promises were based on evidence.

Australia’s results on international tests have been declining over the past 10 years ¾ both in absolute terms and in comparison to other countries ¾ despite continually increased school funding.

According to the Productivity Commission, per-student funding increased in real terms (above inflation) between 2007-08 and 2016-17 by over 14 per cent.

While non-government schools received a larger percentage increase (though coming off a much lower base), government schools still received an 11 per cent per student increase.

It’s been argued this was actually only a very small increase for government schools, because if teacher wages growth is taken into account then schools on average don’t actually have much more discretionary spending.

But this notion — that extra school funding spent on higher teacher salaries doesn’t actually count as extra school funding — fails the common sense test.

The reality is funding has increased for government schools. Some state governments have chosen to spend the extra money on higher teacher salaries. We can argue about the merits of this, but the fact remains that much more is being spent on government schooling than 10 years ago.

And this highlights an important fact that often gets missed in the funding debate: the states have the responsibility of running the government school systems.

State spending on government schools increased by only 3 per cent across 10 years, while federal spending on government schools went up by a whopping 93 per cent (albeit compared to a far lower funding starting point). If people are concerned that government schools are underfunded, they should be blaming state governments, not the federal government.

In any case, the OECD has concluded there are diminishing marginal returns to school funding. In other words, beyond a certain point there is no clear relationship between school spending and student outcomes.

Australia already spends more per student as a dollar amount than the OECD average — and several top-performing countries like Finland and Japan — after adjusting for purchasing power parity (taking into account cost differences between countries). There is very little evidence that further funding increases in Australia would substantially boost results.

But school funding in Australia can definitely be better allocated. And that doesn’t mean the simplistic attitude of ‘let’s take money from greedy non-government schools and give it to poor government schools’. Money for disadvantaged students should be allocated on the basis of evidence, not on the basis of school sector.

We’re often told government schools are below their ‘funding target’, but this doesn’t mean much ¾ because the current target is arbitrary and unreasonably high.

For example, the criteria for being a disadvantaged student is so broad that the majority of all Australian school students are classified as ‘disadvantaged’ and attract extra school funding. This isn’t evidence-based, but it is hugely expensive ¾ and means funding for disadvantage isn’t efficiently allocated to the schools that need it most.

The new government should commit to reviewing the funding formula.

And there are many ways to improve Australia’s school system that don’t require significantly more taxpayer money. For example, ensuring university teacher education degrees pass on evidence-based content would be a cost-effective approach to improving teaching.

The focus of the education policy debate must shift from how much money is spent to how it is spent.

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