Neo‐liberal reforms in Israel's education system: the dialectics of the state

Abstract

This paper offers a reading of the Dovrat Report with the aim of assessing the convoluted and dialectical manifestations of the state – ‘the weak and the strong state’ – in the era of global neo‐liberalism. The Dovrat Report (Ministry Of Education 2005) includes a set of recommendations aiming to bring about structural and comprehensive changes in Israel's education system. We argue that this report, like many other educational reforms implemented elsewhere in the world and articulated against neo‐liberal ideology, actually promotes a Janus‐faced political entity in the field of education (and similarly in other fields). Thus, while the state seemingly withdraws from educational affairs through decentralisation and privatisation policies, it increases its involvement in these affairs in dictating the goals of education; in setting uniform standards of scholastic achievements; in the cultivation of children possessing the values and skills required by neo‐liberal globalisation; and in imposing a national value system intended to render them loyal citizens of their patria. In promoting these contradictory goals, the state often operates indirectly; it develops a tight but elusive regulatory system operated from a distance. Thus, through a set of well‐defined activities, the strong state functions at the background of the weak state, challenging claims that the state crucially loses its power under the global order.

Keywords:

• Israel
• education
• the Dovrat reform
• neo‐liberalism
• decentralisation
• privatisation
• weak state
• strong state
• globalisation

Notes

1. For an extensive discussion of the nature of ethno‐national states, see, for instance, Brubaker (1996) and Gellner (1983).

2. Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, Press release, August 3, 2005.

3. The reform in terms of creating new junior high schools among Israeli Arabs, was very limited. In 1980 there were only 25 Junior high schools serving Arab children (Swirski 1990, 157–58).

4. One of the most common methods of circumventing the Integration Reform was the rapid establishment of new communal settlements by affluent parents, mainly of Ashkenazi background. As Blanck (2005) argues, this development is actually analogous to the ‘white flight’ phenomenon existing in the USA, figuring the escape of white families from inner cities to the suburbs, thus shunning desegregated schools.

5. The deficiencies in the implementation process also included the lack of special teaching methods in heterogonous classrooms, appropriate learning materials, educational experimentations in order to find solutions to problems that might arise from such a drastic educational change, social activities geared at improve ethnic relations and a pluralistic and multicultural core curriculum that includes learning materials from the different ethnic cultures (see Ben Ari, Sharan, and Amir, 1985, 210–19)

6. As stated by Barton (1998), succinctly expressing conservative biases towards managerialism in education, ‘by encouraging schools to compete for pupils, introducing new funding arrangements, providing opportunities for open enrolment, opting out, requiring the publication of league tables and establishing new forms of inspection, schools … will become more effective, efficient and generally improve their educational performance’ (p. 81, cited in Beckman and Cooper 2004, 6).

7. For a critical discussion of managerialism in education, see, for example Beckmann and Cooper (2004) and Chaharbaghi (2007).

8. For further discussion on this topic see, for example, Angus (1994); Broadfoot (1996); Bush (1995); Kooiman (1993); Neave (1988); Stoll and Fink (1996)