Legitimizing public schooling and innovative education policies in strict religious communities: the story of the new Haredi public education stream in Israel

Abstract

The study explored how a group of private Haredi (ultra-Orthodox Jewish) schools legitimized an innovative non-mandatory reform. Specifically, it examined the circumstances that facilitated and hindered a coincidence of wants between the schools and the Ministry of Education, which resulted in signing agreements that changed the status of the schools from private to public. The study drew on interviews and on various documents, including contracts, summaries of meetings, and work plans. The conclusions portray the correspondence between the top-down and bottom-up processes that facilitated the reform. At their intersection, discursive interactions transpired between the Haredi inspectors at the Ministry of Education and school leaders, reflecting a mutual aspiration toward pragmatic legitimacy. The prominent barriers to the reform derived from the Ministry of Education’s strategic assumption that a quiet, unregulated reform would generate less resistance. However, this assumption led to actions that ultimately reduced the effectiveness of the discursive interactions and their ability to produce pragmatic legitimacy. We argue that to legitimize innovative non-mandatory educational reforms in strict religious groups, the State should speak in several voices: through discursive interactions led by cultural mediators, but also through official publications, regulations, and marketing campaigns that would strengthen the reform’s pragmatic legitimacy.

Keywords:

• Politics
• state
• haredi
• religious schools
• legitimacy
• innovative education policy

Acknowledgments

We are indebted to Oren Golan, Gilad Malach, Benny Benjamin, and the excellent reviewers of the Journal of Education Policy for their helpful comments, and to our interviewees for devoting us their time.

Notes

1. The term ‘ultra-religious’ is often used to describe Haredi communities around the world. A proximate term, denoting both Jewish and non-Jewish religious communities, is ‘strict religious’ (e.g. Campbell 2004; Iannaccone 1994; McBride 2010).‏ The highly cited paper of Iannaccone (1994), which delineated the conditions that make strict churches strong, suggested measuring ‘strictness’ by ‘the degree to which a group limits and thereby increases the cost of nongroup activities, such as socializing with members of other churches or pursuing “secular” pastimes’ (1182). Iannaccone also referred to various religious practices that incur high costs, such as abstaining from caffeine, alcohol, or meat, shaving of heads, refusing transfusions, conducting no business on the Sabbath, and taking vows of celibacy, poverty, and silence. He argued that religious strictness makes organizations stronger and more attractive because it reduces free riding; it screens out members who lack commitment, and stimulates participation among those who remain (1183). Our paper refers to religious schools that serve religious groups having stringent (though diverse) limits on their members’ ‘contours’ of personal lives (see Campbell 2004, 158). We chose to use the term ‘strict’, as it encompasses several levels of religious strictness (Iannaccone 1994; McBride 2010; Thomas and Olson 2010). The stricter the denomination, the more secular opportunities are forgone to maintain full fellowship in that denomination (McBride 2010).