Poll positions

Jerusalem Parents’ Association head Eti Binyamin conducts survey on parents’ satisfaction with teachers, payments and the association itself.

By PEGGY CIDOR
Fighting for the little guys_521 (photo credit: Marc Israel Sellem)
Fighting for the little guys_521
(photo credit: Marc Israel Sellem)
Close to the end of her term, Jerusalem Parents’ Association head Eti Binyamin conducted a survey on parents’ satisfaction with the city’s education administration, the teachers, the payments and the association itself.
Here are some of the more interesting results of the survey, which was conducted in February 2010 by Prof. Avi Degani of the Geocartography Company on the positions and perception of parents in Jerusalem regarding the city’s education administration. The survey polled parents of pupils in the city’s state religious and secular school systems (not the haredi or the Arab sectors).
• 42 percent of the parents reported that their children faced violence from other pupils; for 25% of them, it was physical violence on the school grounds. In addition, 8% of the parents reported that their children faced violence from teachers inside the schools.
• 88% of the parents said they attached great importance to principals knowing the pupils personally. Three quarters of these 88% added that they believed their own children’s principals knew them personally.
• Among parents of pupils in religious schools, it was more important that the teachers (rather than the principals) knew the pupils personally, and these parents reported that they had reason to believe this was indeed the situation (no figures provided).
• While 58% of parents estimated that the majority of the teachers had an adequate level of education to teach their children, some 35% of the parents believed that only a small minority of teachers had the required education level. On this issue, there was no difference between parents of elementary school children and those of high school children, or between parents of pupils in the religious school system and in the secular one.
• 40% of parents believe that teachers’ associations have had no impact whatsoever on the level of the education in the city, and 10% believe that teachers who belong to those associations are even less efficient than those who don’t.
• Some of the findings supported Binyamin’s position that politicians in the city exploit the pupils for their benefit. About a third of parents agreed that politicians in the city were exploiting their children in the higher grades; 28% did not think so; and the rest agreed – though to a lesser degree – that politicians frequently meet high-school pupils for their own interests, seeing them as potential voters in the next electoral campaign.
• Only 38% of residents were aware of the existence of the municipal education committee, whose debates are open to the public, and only 18% of them knew that they had the right to attend its meetings.
• About a third of the parents (35%) in the city have turned to the municipal education administration for various reasons, mostly to request a change in the school or preschool to which their children were sent.
• Only 33% of the parents were satisfied by the education administration’s services; 30% said they were totally unsatisfied, and 43% said they were only partly satisfied by the administration’s answers to their claims.