Israel’s PISA collapse exposes a failing education system threatening its future - opinion

On the eve of 5787, and as the election campaign gets underway, Israel has posted shocking results in this year’s PISA tests – the global benchmark for comparing education systems. 

You might think this is because of the haredim (ultra-Orthodox) – after all, a growing share of Israel’s children belong to an education system that does not provide enough instruction in mathematics, science, and English.

But the problem revealed by results released this week is general – and disastrous.

Haredi schools are indeed included in the PISA sampling framework, but haredi boys are very poorly represented.

A Knesset Research and Information Center report on PISA 2022 found that haredi boys made up only 3% of the actual sample before weighting, whereas haredim are a sixth of the population and even more of the youth – mainly because most haredi boys’ schools refused to participate. Moreover, haredi girls performed rather well.

The figure that should truly alarm Israel is that the 2025 collapse is occurring not at the margins of the education system, but at its core.

Israel’s reading score fell by 38 points in just three years, from 474 in 2022 to 436 in 2025. Mathematics fell by 25 points, to 433, and science by 23 points, to 442.

In all three subjects, these are Israel’s lowest-ever PISA results, and they are significantly below the results recorded in 2012, 2015, and 2018. Israel is now below the average of the OECD – the club of developed economies – in all three subjects.

In mathematics, 46% of Israeli students fail to reach even the baseline level of proficiency, compared with an OECD average of 35%.

Similar gaps were recorded in all subjects, and the share of top performers is also below the average for developed countries.

The attitudes of students themselves toward learning and the education system should also set off alarm bells.

According to the organization’s report, “only 68% of students in Israel agreed or strongly agreed with the statement ‘I am curious about many different things,’ compared with 73% on average across OECD countries (and) 37% of students in Israel agreed or strongly agreed with the statement ‘School has been a waste of time,’ compared with just 24% on average across OECD countries.”

More children attend schools where principals say there are insufficient resources. More students report skipping school.

What about the Israeli Arab sector? There is actually a narrowing gap between students there and the Hebrew-speaking education system because the latter deteriorated faster. That is the sort of equality no country should aspire to.

Similarly, Israel’s educational gaps have narrowed somewhat – but again, not because weaker students improved, but because the share of top performers significantly declined.

Yet Israel remains among the countries with some of the largest gaps in the world between its strongest and weakest students – also bad.

The wars of recent years may be part of the explanation (COVID is not, because everyone went through it) – but the downward trend predates that.

What should be done?

First, obviously, a modern country cannot continue funding schools that fail to provide their students with meaningful core instruction in mathematics, English, and science.

As the haredi share of the population grows, the economic and social cost of this arrangement grows with it. Genuine core studies should be a condition for receiving public funding, and the matter is far too urgent to remain a bargaining chip in coalition negotiations.

But the 2025 PISA results make clear that this is not the main problem.

The emergency begins with the people the system manages to put in its classrooms.

Israel expects teachers to perform one of the most important and difficult jobs in society, yet for years it has failed to make teaching a profession in which enough talented people can build attractive professional and economic lives.

Add to this the workload, burnout, and a professional status that does not match the responsibility.

According to the OECD, Israel invests 22% less per student in education than the average, and far less than top performers.

Removing politics and placing education at the forefront

Above all of this lies the chronic politicization of Israeli education.

Education ministers come and go, each arriving with a worldview, flagship programs, and priorities of their own, while an education system requires planning measured in decades.

Education repeatedly becomes a battleground over identity, religion, nationalism, and politics, instead of having fundamental goals stable enough to survive the next minister and the next government.

The same applies to the place occupied by Jewish and traditional studies.

These are important and legitimate components of education in a Jewish state, and Israeli children should know the culture, history, and tradition from which the country emerged.

But classroom hours are a finite resource, which means this is also a question of proportion and effectiveness.

When the ability to read, write, calculate, and understand science is deteriorating rapidly, the curriculum cannot be managed as though these choices carry no cost.

Israel therefore needs a long-term education policy whose central elements are insulated as much as possible from changes of governments and ministers.

There must be broad national agreement on what an Israeli student must know, how much the country is willing to invest to bring excellent people into the classroom, and how to measure whether any of this is actually happening.

The education system cannot reinvent itself every time the person sitting in the education minister’s office changes.

Israel’s qualitative edge derives first and foremost from the quality of the people it produces and their ability to think, invent, research, and build.

That qualitative edge has been a major source of Israel’s economic and technological advantage, and from it has also grown a central part of its military advantage.

A small country with a small population cannot compete over the long term through mass; it competes through quality. If the education system stops producing that quality, there is no reason to assume the economic advantage will endure.

And if the economic and technological advantage erodes, the military advantage is not some permanent asset promised to Israel forever.

This connects to an even larger and more disturbing picture. Israel also depends on allies, foreign investment, scientific and technological cooperation, international legitimacy, and its standing as part of the developed democratic world.

As the country undergoes a process of nationalist radicalization, increasing religiosity, and damage to its liberal institutions, it places those assets at risk as well.

A society that allows sectoral politics to determine what children learn, that struggles to pay enough to attract excellent people into teaching, that changes its educational priorities with every minister, and that devotes ever more energy to culture wars and battles over identity is damaging the foundation from which the Israeli miracle arose in the first place.

The current right-wing religious coalition is not the source of every failure in Israel’s education system, some of which have been building for decades.

But it is deepening precisely the trends Israel now needs to reverse: politicization, sector preference, religious encroachment, and the prioritization of coalition demands over the construction of a modern education system with a uniform set of fundamental skills required of every child.

These are not separate crises.

Israel is accustomed to thinking of education as a demographic problem.

If only we take the haredim out of the equation, many secular and middle-class Israelis tell themselves, and if we also separate the Arab education system, what will emerge behind them is the “real Israel”: an educated, Western, technological country whose education system may be mediocre but is certainly not collapsing.

The 2025 PISA results should put an end to that illusion.

Add this to the long list of reasons why change is urgently needed in 5787.

The writer is a former Cairo-based Middle East editor and London-based Europe/Africa editor of the Associated Press. He served as chairman of the Foreign Press Association in Jerusalem and authored two books about Israel.