Is it possible to improve the quality of Israel’s early childhood
education frameworks, and if so, how? And what would the Ministry of
Education have to do to be prepared for a possible transfer of
responsibility for early childhood frameworks from the Ministry of the
Economy? At the request of the Ministry of Education, the fellows of the
Mandel School for Educational Leadership’s 23rd cohort explored these
questions in this year’s group exercise. At the end of the exercise, the
fellows presented a document titled “Early Childhood Education Finds
Room to Grow” at an event held at the school at the beginning of
February.
The cohort 23 fellows examined three central aspects of
early childhood education: the state’s responsibility and role
regarding preschool children; early childhood needs and the quality of
the public services currently provided; and organizational and
professional aspects of the current system and the expected transition.
To complete the picture, a brief review was conducted of the legal and
budgetary aspects of the issue.
As part of this work, the
fellows conducted a comparison of Israel’s early childhood daycare
centers to other OECD countries. “Early childhood education (from birth to three years) in Israel has for years been the responsibility of the
Ministry of the Economy, based on the idea that daycare centers were a
means of removing barriers to women’s involvement in the labor market…
The possible transfer of responsibility for early childhood education to
the Ministry of Education provides a good opportunity for a
re-evaluation of the objectives that guide policy in this area,” they
wrote in the report.
The main claim made by the document is that, given the large
socioeconomic gaps in Israel and the critical importance of early
childhood for long-term individual development, there needs to be real
investment in providing equal opportunities. The report therefore
recommends prioritizing the improvement of the quality of early
childhood daycare centers and educational frameworks, and selectively
promoting access to these institutions among vulnerable populations,
using socioeconomic criteria.
Moshe Vigdor, the
director-general of the Mandel Foundation–Israel, opened the evening
with congratulatory remarks to the cohort 23 fellows and to the school’s
faculty, and also conveyed the best wishes of the chairman of the
Foundation, Mr. Morton Mandel, and of its president, Prof. Jehuda
Reinharz.
“Your decision to examine the question of early childhood frameworks
through the lens of one of our society’s biggest problems - social
inequality - is a values-based decision, rooted in a world view that sees
the state and the public education system as having full responsibility
for reducing socioeconomic gaps and creating a more just society,” said Danny Bar Giora,
director of the Mandel School for Educational Leadership. “You then
succeeded in translating this world view into practical recommendations…
This connection between vision and practice is the entire ‘Mandelian’
approach in a nutshell,” he said.
