Israel’s education minister appears to have found a political response to a national schooling crisis: Challenge the data and the body that produced it before the public can fully reckon with the depth of the failure.
According to reports, only 3% of ninth-grade students who took Israel’s national science assessment reached the high standard set by the Education Ministry. More than half were reportedly at a low or medium-low level.
The picture is not much better elsewhere: Reported results in sixth-grade math and English and in ninth-grade English also showed large gaps between Israeli pupils and the ministry’s own expectations.
They should have led to a serious public reckoning over what Israeli children lost during the COVID pandemic years, what they have lost during the war years, and what they are still losing in overcrowded classrooms, unstable schools, and systems that do not teach core subjects seriously enough.
Instead, Education Minister Yoav Kisch has focused his response on the instrument that exposed the crisis.
Israel can't be 'advanced' while treating schooling as a PR problem
Kisch has accused the National Authority for Measurement and Evaluation in Education of serious failures and misleading publications. He has argued that until the matter is clarified, RAMA’s publications cannot be relied upon. He says the issue is not only the poor results themselves but also alleged flaws in RAMA’s conduct and publication process.
Kisch has reportedly ordered officials to advance the creation of internal measurement and evaluation units inside the Education Ministry. Critics say the move could weaken the independence of the very body meant to measure student achievement.
RAMA Director-General Gal Alon has pushed back, reportedly accusing Kisch of trying over time to influence how achievement data is published and saying he has no authority to prevent publication of the results.
The scandal is not only that Israeli students performed terribly, which is frightening enough. It’s also that the minister responsible for the education system appears more focused on challenging the publication of embarrassing results than on presenting a clear plan to address them.
Israel cannot speak endlessly about being a Western democracy, the Start-Up Nation, an advanced economy, and a regional power while treating basic schooling as a public-relations problem. Democracies require citizens who can read, reason, argue, and assess information.
Modern economies require workers who can handle mathematics, English, science, and technology.
A country that depends on hi-tech, intelligence, medicine, engineering, and military sophistication cannot afford an education minister whose response to bad data appears to be escalating the fight with the officials responsible for measuring it.
The international evidence is already bleak. In PISA 2022, Israeli 15-year-olds scored below the OECD average in mathematics and science, with mathematics at 458 (OECD average 472) and science at 465 (OECD average 485).
In TIMSS 2023, Israeli eighth-graders fell 32 points in both mathematics and science from 2019, with RAMA describing the decline as the sharpest among participating OECD countries and Israel’s lowest performance since 2007.
Kisch can dispute methodology. He can demand reviews. He can ask hard questions about test length, curriculum alignment, sampling, and presentation. In fact, a serious minister would do exactly that.
Damage control dressed up as governance
But a serious minister would also do it transparently, after publication, with independent experts – not by weakening RAMA and building a more convenient measurement system inside the ministry he runs.
The children sitting in Israeli classrooms today will be the adults expected to run hospitals, defend borders, pay taxes, build companies, judge evidence, and keep this country democratic. They will inherit a state already strained by war, inequality, sectoral gaps, and global isolation.
Withholding their test results will not make them more literate. Challenging RAMA will not teach them algebra. Turning national assessment into a political battlefield will not produce one more engineer, doctor, teacher, or informed voter.
Kisch’s job is not to protect the ministry from the numbers. It is to protect Israel’s children from becoming them. If the education minister is ashamed of the results, good. He should be. But shame is only useful when it leads to responsibility.
In this case, responsibility means publishing the data, protecting the integrity of the measurements, and presenting a serious recovery plan. Anything else is not leadership. It is damage control dressed up as governance.