Class struggle

The municipality is taking steps to improve educational services in the Arab sector, but the gaps are still wide, and in the meantime the vacuum is being filled by the Wakf.

By PEGGY CIDOR
Palestinian first-graders sit with their schoolbooks during class in the West Bank city of Ramallah February 4, 2013. (photo credit: REUTERS)
Palestinian first-graders sit with their schoolbooks during class in the West Bank city of Ramallah February 4, 2013.
(photo credit: REUTERS)
In November 2002, during a city council meeting, a violent exchange of verbal attacks broke out between then-mayor Ehud Olmert and Meretz council members led by Pepe Alalu. The issue at hand: Meretz’s decision to petition the High Court against the mayor for not providing the 1,300 classrooms that were lacking in the city’s Arab sector.
Olmert remarked correctly at the time that the building of classrooms was the responsibility of the Education Ministry – to which Alalu replied that if the city’s administration had fulfilled its minimum obligations toward the Arab residents, it would long ago have found a way to get the ministry to take care of the issue.
Today, more than a decade later, the municipality has changed its policy on that matter, and the 2015 budget aims to improve the conditions in the Arab sector significantly. Furthermore, the municipality published a tender this week for a director of an Arab education administration – which would be independent of the city’s regular Education Administration – to oversee the city’s Arab educational institutions. A candidate should be appointed within less than a month.
Alalu had argued in 2002 that petitioning the court was the only solution in the face of the severe classroom shortage, which had left thousands of children no choice but to attend unofficial schools, or simply drop out of school altogether. However, in most cases, the best solution for Arab parents was to send their children to the private sector – some of them to schools operated by Christian organizations, but most of them to schools established and run by the Wakf, the Islamic trust for the administration of mosques and Islamic holy sites.
As it turns out, not only are the Islamic schools accessible and well-equipped with classrooms, they have also proven to be some of the highest-level schools in the city.
This means that although the municipality is working hard – compared to a decade ago – to obtain the necessary budgets to build classrooms and new schools in the Arab sector, a large number of Arab residents are no longer waiting for them.
Indeed, the lack of classrooms in the public school system has encouraged the proliferation of more private schools, few of which rely on parental payment and many of which receive their funding from the Palestinian Authority or Arab countries (such as Saudi Arabia) via Islamic organizations.
One such school is the Abu-Bakr School for Girls in Sur Bahir, between the Arnona and Homat Shmuel neighborhoods. Hatem Abu Asla, a retired municipality engineer, is a member of the parents’ association that established the school.
“This is only one of the schools we have established here through the Wakf,” he explains in a phone conversation. “We have six schools in the village – two high schools, one for girls and one for boys, and four [gender-separated] elementary schools, all financed and directed by the Wakf.”
These schools, which have a total of 2,000 students, do not receive any funding or support from the municipality.
Abu Asla says that the two high schools take only the tawijih – the Palestinian matriculation exam – and their students have obtained high scores year after year.
Hinting at the ongoing debate over introducing the Israeli curriculum into the Arab sector’s schools – a move proponents argue will improve students’ future job prospects – he adds that the graduates of the Wakf schools have no trouble finding suitable employment.
Still, he doesn’t reject the possibility of adding Hebrew lessons to the curriculum.
“The students will eventually know and use Hebrew anyway, so why not introduce it at school already?” he says.
The problem, he continues, is “that the municipality doesn’t offer us anything for that purpose or any other purpose we may need – that is why we do not rely on the Education Administration, and we manage to educate our youth [to produce] the highest results. The schools managed by the Wakf are far better than those supplied by the municipality anyway.”
Asked what makes the Wakf schools so good, Abu Asla replies that “in our schools, we keep the old traditions – order, discipline, respect for the teachers, the way I studied in my youth, not the way it is these days. But don’t imagine that they are in a kind of prison; the children are free, they can express themselves, while we maintain the basic rules of rigor in education. The students know that they cannot allow themselves to transgress the rules.”
As for the curriculum, he says it is the Wakf and its teachers who establish and supervise it, and that the parents’ committee is not very involved in these matters.
However, he does not sound too concerned that an education based on the Wakf ideology could lead to Islamic extremism among the youth.
“There is no fear our students will become extremists of any kind,” he says. “They will complete their studies and obtain the best results.”
ANOTHER CONSEQUENCE of the neglect that the Arab public school system has suffered is the high percentage of dropouts – 17% higher than in the non-Arab areas of the city. According to a recent report by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, the percentage of high-school dropouts in the city’s Arab sector stands at 40% of all school-age Arab children in Jerusalem, the majority of them coming from the public school system.
According to a report published last year by media activist Daoud Kuttab, a Palestinian writer for media site Al-Monitor, the high dropout rate is linked to the fact that these teens can earn money and support their parents relatively easily in the city, compared to students of the same age in the Palestinian cities, where there are far fewer employment opportunities.
That said, the municipality has allocated an additional budget of NIS 4 million to help lower the dropout rate in 2015, and more funding is planned for 2016. One of the steps already under way is the addition of extra hours at schools and community centers, with free afternoon programs including sports, computers and drama for teenagers – “to keep them off the streets and inside educational institutions,” as Mayor Nir Barkat recently explained.
Altogether, there are 185 schools in the city’s Arab sector: 57 public schools (those under the supervision of the municipal Education Administration), 53 recognized but unofficial schools, 35 private schools (for which parents pay), 32 Wakf (Islamic) schools, and eight UNRWA-administered schools (mostly inside the Shuafat refugee camp).
Figures from the 2012 Jerusalem Almanac show 88,000 Arab children from kindergarten to 12th grade: 42,000 in official public schools, 26,000 in the recognized but unofficial schools, and 20,000 in Wakf- and UNRWA-run private schools. About 5,000 school-age children were not registered in any system.
In February 2011, the Supreme Court accepted a petition by ACRI demanding that the state bear the cost of tuition for east Jerusalem children who had to go to recognized but unofficial schools because of the classroom shortage in the official schools.
“The competent authorities are well aware of the severe violation of the rights of the children of east Jerusalem for equality in education and are acting sincerely and with a sense of commitment to rectify the situation,” wrote Justice Ayala Procaccia in her ruling. “But the pace of activity and the resources devoted to it indicate prospects of only a partial solution to this serious and complicated problem in the coming years.”
Anne Suciu, an attorney from ACRI, says that the municipality’s inadequate solutions have created a situation in which parents are pushed to look for educational alternatives. “The municipality is ignoring the severe shortage of classrooms in east Jerusalem, which the High Court has ordered the municipality to resolve. According to that ruling, in February 2016 the five years given by the court to the municipality to solve the problem will be up, and it is already clear that the shortage of classrooms will still be significant, which means that the municipality will have to pay the ‘recognized but unofficial’ and private school fees instead of the parents.”
As for the fact that the vacuum left by the municipality is being filled by the Wakf in many areas, Suciu said she “refuses to say that there is any danger of eventual Islamic influence,” adding that the problem is the neglect and lack of facilities for the children of east Jerusalem.
The shortage of classrooms in the Arab school system is about the same as that in the haredi system, and despite significant municipal efforts to improve the situation in both sectors, children still study in makeshift locations like rented apartments and warehouses, or in the parallel system of private schools.
A spokeswoman for the municipality, asked to give details on the Arab private school system, answered last week that “these details are not known to the city’s administration,” and suggested addressing the question to the Palestinian Authority education minister.
But as for its commitment to improving the state-school system in the Arab sector, a municipal spokesperson said, “For the past six years, the municipality, with the support of the government, allocated hundreds of millions of shekels to reducing the gap in the number of classrooms, renovating the infrastructures and development of the neighborhoods and the quality of life in the Arab sector.”
In the past year, the spokesperson said, 93 new classrooms were allocated, and seven new schools and 25 kindergartens were opened.
“In view of the decrease in the school dropout rate, an additional budget has been approved to rent new educational building for educational purposes. A new educational program is being prepared now at the municipality, to improve education among teenagers in the Arab sector,” the spokesperson added. “A pilot project in 10 schools in which the study hours will continue until 6 p.m. at the cost of NIS 3 million is beginning now.”
THE ARAB schools’ choice of curriculum is part of the equation as well. Until recently, all of these schools, public and private, were using the Palestinian curriculum.
However, in 2014, before the violent events of last summer, five large schools decided, together with the parents’ associations, to include the Israeli curriculum and enable students to take the bagrut – the Israeli matriculation exam. Since then, three additional schools have joined them, allowing the students to take either one of the exams.
Despite official protests from the Palestinian Authority – in an official declaration in last June, chief negotiator Saeb Erekat accused Israel of trying to “erase Palestinian history” – the five schools’ parents’ association have remained firm in their decision, and sources at Safra Square indicate that there might soon be a few more schools adopting the curriculum.
“We do not object or interfere with the parents’ decision to remain with the tawijih,” explained Barkat at a recent press conference with the foreign media regarding the new budget allocations, “but it is clear that by taking the Israeli curriculum and the matriculation tests, the students improve their chances of getting a better job, so we are happy to include any school that decides to do so.”
Journalist Muhammad Abu Khdeir – the uncle of the boy of the same name who was murdered last year – is a writer for the Jerusalem daily Al-Quds. He remarks that “the move to the Israeli curriculum perhaps helps in finding better jobs, but it also serves a very clear political agenda of the mayor, who represents the settlers’ interests at city hall.”
Asked if he thinks the new budget might represent a change of attitude, Abu Khdeir smiles and adds that “it might help improve things here and there, but the question is, whose interest are these steps serving? Are they designed to improve our youth’s lives and conditions? No, it will help improve the settlers’ interests.
The tawijih is not the main issue here.”
Neither Barkat nor any official at the Education Administration has said officially that the city’s goal is to transfer all the high schools to the Israeli curriculum, but the municipality’s efforts appear to be headed in that direction.
“We cannot interfere or impose it, of course,” adds a source at Safra Square, “but obviously we have no interest in seeing more Arab youth moving to the Wakf schools and becoming exposed to Islamic ideology.”
On the ground, sources at the Education Administration admit that there is a race of sorts between the involved parties to reach the largest number of students.
“It is not a political matter,” says one of the sources.
“It is simply because it is our duty to provide adequate schools for all the students of the city, and we are aware of the years of neglect. This is not going to be solved in one year.”
Alalu, meanwhile, says the problem is that efforts to build new classrooms fail to take into account the birthrate in the Arab sector.
“Yes, I know that the municipality is promoting construction of classrooms, but it is always an answer to the needs of former years,” he says.
As for the tawijih issue, he continues, “there is a real problem in the schools managed by the Wakf – they will not allow [students to take] the Israeli matriculation, and while their students obtain high marks on the Palestinian exams, this is good [only] for the West Bank cities; [it is] not [good] enough to go to university or find a good job in Jerusalem.”
A retired teacher in one of the public schools in the Arab sector adds that there are problems with the Wakf schools from an administrative perspective as well: “Sometimes the salaries in the Wakf’s schools were higher than ours, but they didn’t always arrive on time each month.”
As for whether the private schools will accept support from the municipality, Abu Asla says that “any financial help will be welcome” – though he admits that it is the Wakf that makes such decisions. •