My 10th grader really wanted to learn this year.
Always a pretty good student (though lessons, it should also be acknowledged, had sometimes been a bit of a distraction from his vibrant social life), he had chosen his two specialized subjects, in which extra time and effort would be invested over the coming three years. He had spent the summer getting his math up to speed. He had internalized that he was entering the crucial final three high school years that would determine his matriculation standard and thus which undergraduate doors would be open to him.
But he's not been in school for ages now. It's not quite Alice Cooper territory ("Out for summer/Out till fall/We might not go back at all/School's out forever..."), but it's an open-ended, all-out strike by the membership of the Secondary School Teachers Organization.
The portents, for those of us who would rather like not to be home-schooling our children more than we've had to do in any case to supplement the long-standing deficiencies of the education system, are not good:
The main teachers' union, the Histadrut's National Teachers Union, has already signed a salary hike and reform package with the Treasury, which the government is reluctant to jeopardize by offering better terms to the SSTO. The SSTO's leader, Ran Erez, is, to put this gently, not the most charismatic or articulate of advocates for his members' cause. The education minister, Yuli Tamir, is politically weak and seems embarrassingly irrelevant to the whole dispute. Parents, to judge by my own experience, have not been assiduously wooed to help press for the teachers' demands - not even unassiduously wooed, come to think of it. And at the same time, the union says it has prepared strategically for this resort to labor action, and will stay out for months if necessary.
A potent recipe for deadlock.
In trying to assess which of the disputatious parties has right, or at least less wrong, on its side, a crucial question relates to the deal agreed by the NTU: If it's a good agreement, why is the SSTO balking at it? And if it's a bad one, why did the NTU go along?
Putting that question to various teachers and other insiders this week initially muddied the picture. Some said it was a reasonable enough deal for elementary school teachers, but much more problematic for those teaching older pupils. Others said it was a lousy deal, period, requiring more work hours for less hourly pay, noted that the NTU had selfishly signed up only on the condition that its members also get any additional benefits that the SSTO might manage to extract, and asserted that many NTU members are deeply unhappy with it. Some muttered about the purportedly grandiose egos running wild at the helm of the SSTO; still others cited dark political ambitions that had ostensibly motivated senior figures at the NTU.
But ultimately, the picture has clarified. The NTU may have believed it was signing the best deal it could get, but the high school teachers think it's a disaster, because incremental improvements are not what's required here. The education system in Israel is collapsing, a long gradual slide downhill now accelerating into freefall.
Low pay means embittered, unmotivated teachers, and keeps charismatic new blood from joining the educators' ranks. Classrooms overflow with 40-plus students and classroom hours have been inexorably cut back, so kids aren't actually learning so much as desperately being crammed for exams in which they are faring ever more poorly. Schools are collapsing physically, because of inadequate budgets. And the people of Israel just don't seem to care.
THE COMMON theme in the various conversations I've had with teachers this week, indeed, was that while, yes, the teachers want "x" percent more pay, "y" percent fewer pupils per class and a host of other highly specific demands, this is not so much a strike as a wail - a deep, agonized howl about a failing system; a cry of outrage at the contempt in which the teaching profession is held by government, and by extension, by an electorate that allows government to get away with it.
"Yes, salaries must be higher. I can only afford to do this because my wife is the main breadwinner. But this is not, absolutely not, just about money," stresses David Graniewitz, a London-born English and history teacher with 20 years experience here. "Teachers in some downtrodden schools get up in the morning feeling like rags. They are treated like dirt. And society seems to have no regard for what we do. You get kids coming into class and saying they can't afford the books, as they brandish the latest mobile phone.
"I'm offended," Graniewitz rolled on, the anguish audible, as it was in every conversation I had. "I'm offended that the government has not turned in desperation to the Labor courts to force us back to work. Don't they care? Does nobody care?"
In an opinion piece in The Jerusalem Post earlier this week, Graniewitz noted that this part of the school year, immediately following the Succot break, "is actually the most critical time... a period largely undisrupted by religious festivals, days of commemoration and bagrut [matriculation] exams. For two months, until the Hanukka vacation... I actually feel that I am doing the job for which I am trained rather than merely babysitting in between vacations, or helping my pupils cram for exams. Knowledge can be imparted and class discussions conducted in a relatively relaxed atmosphere..."
End of year bagrut exams can always be rescheduled, Graniewitz elaborated when we spoke. "But these weeks, these real learning weeks, they can't be made up. Every day that's lost now really is lost; it's gone for good."
And yet, he reiterates, the strike is being allowed to continue, the dispute to fester, the children to lose irreplaceable time. Save us from ourselves, is the essence of Graniewitz's message, because, sure, we teachers are hurting and we teachers are hoping to negotiate better terms. But it is your children who are really suffering. It is your children, and their future, we're really striking for.
