Abstract
During the past 30 years, teacher training in Israel has undergone a revolution: the teaching profession has become academic, and since the mid-1980s all teachers were required to attend either an academic college of education or a university in order to acquire a bachelor's degree and a teacher's license. Yet, despite this process of academization, the teaching profession has found it difficult to establish itself as an academic field, and teachers constantly have to prove — to themselves, as well as to public opinion — that they are worthy of an academic status. This paper analyses the process of academization of teacher education in Israel, with special emphasis on the policies of the two chief actors in the field — the Ministry of Education and the Council for Higher Education — showing that they traditionally held contradictory perceptions of teachers and of the teaching profession, and that this source of conflict has slowed down the academization process and weakened the profession, thus preventing it from reaching its ultimate goal — the upgrading of the teaching profession.
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Notes
Grades 7–9, in which social integration between children of different socio-economic backgrounds was supposed to take place.
See, for example, President George W. Bush's words upon signing the No Child Left Behind Education Bill (2001): ‘I can’t think of any better way to say to teachers, we trust you. And, first of all, we’ve got to thank all the teachers who are here. I thank you for teaching. Yours is indeed a noble profession. And our society is better off because you decided to teach’. (http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2002/01/20020108-1.html)
The psychometric test is an admission requirement to all academic institutions in Israel. It is administered centrally, very much similar to the American SAT. However, Israeli applicants need also have a full matriculation diploma. A full psychometric score is 800 points, and the required score to enter a teacher training college was 450 points in the year 2000. Today (2011), it stands at 500 points. The average score of Israeli applicants to institutions of higher learning is about 535 points.
The use of the term ‘principal’ here emphasizes the problematic academic position of the colleges of education in Israel. As professional schools for training teachers, they were structured and administered like schools. Therefore, their directors were called ‘principals’, and sometimes ‘college heads’. As the process of academization advanced, they adopted the title of ‘presidents’, but the old terminology referring to them as ‘principals’ still remained in usage, especially in the Ministry's documents.
In Israel, academic credits are often measured in the number of hours one studies for a degree. An annual hour stands for 1 h every week over two semesters. However, beyond the 108 hours demanded by the CHE (which included theoretical studies in education, disciplinary courses and practical training), the Ministry of Education added hours of its own (e.g., a first aid course, language instruction and more). It is also stated in the Guiding Model document (clause 1.2.2.c) that ‘an institution has the right to include in its program studies that reflect its special character’. The colleges therefore added ‘enrichment’ courses that served to express their ideology. For example, colleges training teachers for the national religious network added compulsory hours for religious studies. All this resulted in an enormous load of studies for a B.Ed. — at least twice the load required for a B.A or a B.Sc. Despite these demanding requirements, the B.Ed. had (and still has) low prestige.
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Hofman, A., Niederland, D. Is Teacher Education Higher Education? The Politics of Teacher Education in Israel, 1970–2010. High Educ Policy 25, 87–106 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/hep.2011.24
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/hep.2011.24