Separate and unequal: Arab education in Israel
By Ori Nir
Haaretz, 12 December 2001
Perhaps the most depressing part of "Second-Class: Discrimination Against Arab Children in Israel's Schools," issued last week by Human Rights Watch, is how the Education Ministry responded to the findings that show the huge discrepancy between the quality of education for Jews and Arabs in Israel.
Yair Levin, deputy director-general of the Education Ministry and the person responsible for external relations, told the editor of the report, Zama Coursen-Neff, that the gaps - born of years of systematic discrimination - "will take 30 or 40 years to close." And he added "that's nothing from a historical perspective." Dr. Dafna Golan, chairman of the Pedagogical Secretariat's committee for closing education gaps told the human rights group's researcher that even if there was equal distribution of resources, the physical conditions - number of children per classroom, achievement levels, and teacher training - won't ever be equal because the gap created over the years is so large.
Dalia Sprinzak, from the ministry's budget department, said she doesn't think the gap will ever be closed, even though the ministry is "heading in the right direction." She said expectations for improvement are too high. For Coursen-Neff, a trained lawyer who specializes in childrens' rights, it was difficult to accept or merely tut-tut the fact that nearly one-quarter of Israeli school children are in a separate school system that is inferior in every respect to the school system for the Jewish majority in the country. From her perspective, it's not only a gross violation of the civil rights of Arab citizens of the country, according to the state of Israel's own laws, but also a violation of the basic human right to education as defined by international treaties that Israel has signed.
"But beyond the legal matter, which is important unto itself, there's a clear Israeli interest here,"said the researcher at the end of a year's work on the report. "In our view, it's an important interest for the government of Israel to give the Arab population quality education, if it wants to produce good and productive citizens."
The report from Human Rights Watch, considered the largest human rights organization in the U.S., is a 187-page document. It deals with all the important aspects of the differences between Jewish and Arab education in Israel, from the nursery level to the university, in budgets, curricula, teacher training, physical conditions, and services like psychologists and special education counselors. The report says that the discrimination against Arab education is systematic, and has serious ramifications for the chances of Arab citizens - some 19 percent of the population of the state, and a quarter of the school-age population - to reach higher education, and become integrated into the civic fabric of Israel as equal partners.
"Government-run Arab schools are a world apart from government-run Jewish schools," said Coursen-Neff, counsel to the Children's Rights Division of Human Rights Watch. "In virtually every respect, Palestinian Arab children get an education inferior to that of Jewish children, and their relatively poor performance in school reflects this."
Arab children drop out of school at three times the rate of Jewish children and are less likely to pass the national matriculation exams for a high school diploma. Only a handful make it to university. Among Israeli Arabs, the Bedouin from the Negev Desert fare the worst in every respect. "Discrimination is cumulative, and at each level, more Arab children are winnowed out," she said.
An Arab child who doesn't go to kindergarten, or goes to an overcrowded school understaffed with poorly trained teachers, reaches first grade already behind his Jewish contemporaries. That continues throughout the Arab pupil's years in elementary schools and high school - especially considering the fact that so many don't continue, but drop out at a relatively early stage. The result, at the end of the process, is that only 5.7 percent of those earning a B.A. degree in Israel, according to 1999 data, are Arabs.
Deaf kids don't learn their own language
There's an especially grave situation, says the report, in the areas of special education that require special skills and larger budgets, a task at which the Jewish educational system excels. These students with "special needs," according to the 1988 Special Education Law, should get appropriate schooling for their needs, free. The pupils are those with cognitive or behavioral problems.
An Education Ministry placement committee is supposed to decide whether a pupil with special needs should be placed in a regular classroom, put in a class for special needs students in a regular school, or sent to a special school. Arab pupils suffer from discrimination in all three tracks. According to ministry data, the number of Arab pupils who need special education far outnumber those who indeed get those services. Only 18 percent of the pupils in special education classes are Arabs, even though 30 percent of the pupils in the country who need such services are Arabs - according to the ministry's own data.
The proportion of Arab children with serious physical handicaps is also higher than Jewish children - 5.4 percent to 3.3 percent. Just among the Bedouin of the Negev 7 percent of the children are deaf, due to congenital defects. Various research reports show that, in effect, the proportion of special needs pupils among Arab pupils are even higher, but that doesn't show up in the official statistics, because the diagnostic procedures for the Arab children are also faulty.
Greater need
Despite their greater needs, budgets for special education in the Arab sector is much smaller. In 1996, only 11 percent of the instructional hours for special education was devoted to Arab schools. In 1999 there was a slight improvement, as the number reached 14 percent. As could be expected, the budgets for integrating Arab pupils with special needs in regular schools (usually requiring a specially trained teacher who helps the regular classroom teacher) are much less than for the Jewish sector. And those special education teachers in the Arab sector have much less access to experts like psychologists and social workers. As opposed to their Jewish colleagues, they don't have special curriculum or special educational aids for the Arab pupils.
There are also far fewer special education schools in the Arab sector than in the Jewish one. There are 45 special education kindergartens in the Arab sector compared to 484 Jewish kindergartens, and 44 special education schools in the Arab sector compared to 222 Jewish schools. The classroom populations in the Arabs special education schools are much more crowded, because of the scarcity of the schools and their problematic geographic distribution around the country. Many pupils, who according to objective criteria need to go to special education schools, end up by default in regular schools.
As in every other aspect of Arab education, the situation is particularly bad for the Bedouin of the Negev. Only 1.4 percent of the Bedouin children in first to 12th grade went to special education classes in 1999, compared to a national average of 3 percent for Jewish children and 2 percent for Arabs.
Due to the lack of special education classrooms, many Arab parents send their children to Jewish special education schools, which results in Arab children not learning in their own language. Deaf Arab children end up learning in Hebrew, because of a lack of Arab clinical communications specialists - only 21 of the 1,185 trained clinical communications specialists in the school system are Arabs, according to ministry data from 2000.
Chronic budget problems
The report takes a close look at early education. The main problem in the Arab sector is the lack of pre-kindergarten compulsory nurseries and a dearth of qualified nursery school teachers. One of the reasons for the situation is the legal obligation of local authorities to pay for a quarter of the costs of the pre-kindergarten compulsory nurseries. Arab local authorities suffer from chronic budget difficulties and can't afford to budget for nursery school teachers to the extent Jewish schools can. Jewish schools also benefit from overseas donations that Arab schools aren't able to raise. The lack of nursery schools is particularly evident in the Bedouin Negev community, especially in the unrecognized settlements where the Islamic Movement in recent years has been opening private nursery schools.
Human rights groups and other international organizations have been intensively dealing with the issue of Israeli Arabs in the past year. To a large extent there has been a "Palestinianization" of how they added the issue of Israel's Arabs to the international agenda; both governments and non-government organizations regard the Israeli Arab minority as deserving of international protection.
The European Parliament is holding a special debate today on the state of the Arab population inside the State of Israel. Representatives from Musawa, the Israeli Arab political lobby, plan to distribute copies of the Human Rights Watch report to the parliamentarians and ask the delegates to implement the articles in the economic agreements between Israel and the EU that condition economic cooperation on the protection of human and civil rights.
Over the years, the children's division of Human Rights Watch has published reports on violence against children around the world, on the AIDS epidemic among Kenyan youngsters, the compulsory military draft for children in the Congo, sexual assaults on girls in South African schools, minors employed in the cotton fields of Egypt, and violence and discrimination against gay children in U.S. schools.
As in its other reports, the organization makes a series of recommendations to the Israeli establishment about action to take - using affirmative action to to create equality between Arab and Jewish education in the state. But the report also recommends that UNESCO "define the steps" to be taken against the policies that violate international treaties against discriminatory education.
