Media representations of national and international standardized testing in the Israeli education system

ABSTRACT

This study applies discourse analysis to Israeli media coverage of national and international standardized examinations within Israel's public education system. Through systematic analysis of the topic in the two main Israeli financial publications between the years 2000 and 2013, we explore the nature and narrative of the media and compare the coverage of national and international standardized testing. We find that most of the media attention was devoted to international examinations, while national examinations were covered in a more limited yet critical way, perceived as unnecessary and even dubious. International examinations, in contrast, were described as axiomatic components of the education system. Articles on both national and international standardized testing criticize the education system, blaming teachers, the Ministry of Education, budget constraints, and marginalized populations for Israeli students’ inadequate results. We frame our analysis by alignment of the articles along global–local and also neoliberal–humanistic axes. We structure our assessment within the global–local nexus and discuss the broader implications of the role of the testing in framing the local educational public discourse.

KEYWORDS:

• Standardized examinations
• PISA
• Israel
• testing
• education policy
• discourse analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The Marker started as an independent online magazine in 2000 and later partially merged with the Haaretz daily newspaper and also turned into printed tabloid.

2 The Meitzav – a Hebrew acronym for ‘Growth and Efficiency Measures of Schools’ includes student achievement tests and questionnaires regarding school atmosphere and pedagogical setting (administered to principals, teachers, and students). The Meitzav achievement tests focus on four core subjects: Mathematics, Native Language (Hebrew/Arabic), English, and Science and Technology. These assessments are administered to students at the second, fifth, and the eighth grade levels. The assessments are designed in alignment with the curricula and aim to examine the extent to which school students in elementary and junior-high schools achieve the expected level required of them according to these curricula (Beller, 2010).

3 The PISA is conducted in three-year cycles and examines the knowledge and skills of 15-year-olds in compulsory education subjects. The OECD develops the assessment tasks used in PISA by commissioning agencies to produce the tests. Although PISA began as a joint study of the OECD member countries, it has expanded its scope to involve non-member countries as well. This international dimension of the survey makes PISA particularly significant as an indicator of the success or failure of educational policies (Grek, 2009).

4 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study.

5 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study.

6 In conjunction, moreover, the public interest in education and thus the media coverage of education in general has also been gradually rising (Yemini & Sagie, 2015).

7 Notably, only several schools in this stream actually participate in the standardized testing, while most of them refuse to do so.