After national standardized exams showed poor grades, education minister halts them

Education Minister Yoav Kisch has ordered the temporary cancellation of a national standardized exam program and has barred officials from the body that manages the assessment from entering the Education Ministry, his ministry said in a statement on Tuesday.

The Meitzav exam — managed by the National Authority for Educational Measurement and Evaluation (RAMA) — which tests language, math and science skills among fifth- and eighth-graders is usually given toward the end of the school year.

Kisch reportedly announced the move during a meeting of Education Ministry officials.

0:00 / 0:00

Promoted: JPPI, Rabbi Sharon Brous

It comes amid a bitter dispute between Kisch and the authority following the publication of poor student performance results, and despite the findings of an independent review, ordered by Kisch, that had praised RAMA’s professionalism and recommended closer cooperation with the ministry.

Kisch has called into question the reliability of the test results and reportedly cited the independent review, published Monday, even though it found no fault with RAMA methodology and said that there should be “a policy of stable measurement and assessment for at least three years.”

Get The Times of Israel's Daily Edition by email and never miss our top stories

By signing up, you agree to the terms

According to Hebrew media reports, the Education Ministry’s legal adviser challenged Kisch’s new decision during the meeting, telling him: “You cannot paralyze RAMA.” The ministry’s Director General Meir Shimoni insisted, however, that the minister’s directive would stand.

Kisch confirmed the suspension of RAMA’s activities at the ministry, telling several outlets: “We cannot continue working in such a dysfunctional manner.”

The minister said the suspension was temporary and intended to allow reforms recommended by the independent review to be implemented.

However, an unnamed senior education official told Channel 12 that Kisch “is acting completely against” the outcome of the review, which, he noted, had urged securing stability in assessments.

“Kisch is canceling the tests and creating chaos in the education system,” the source said. The review “determined to strengthen and build the corporation — Kisch is prohibiting them [the tests] from being held and instructing the ministry workers to not work with RAMA.”

The independent review released on Monday found no basis to doubt the reliability of the RAMA exam results, but shared some of the ministry’s concerns about how they were presented, saying that presenting the highest level of performance in subjects as “compliance with the requirements of the curriculum” is problematic.

The report advocated strengthening the Education Ministry’s and RAMA’s relationship, and implementing a stable evaluation policy for the next three years, emphasizing the need to measure students’ performance in order for the ministry to make good decisions.

Leader of the opposition Democrats party Yair Golan, wrote that Kisch doesn’t like the results of the monitoring tests, so “he is trying to hide them.”

Golan declared the education system is “collapsing under an unfit and corrupt government that is busy covering up its failures instead of fixing them. The data is not the enemy, Yoav Kisch. The failure is the problem. Israel’s children need a minister who fights for their future, not a minister who fights those who uncover the situation.”

Last month, the Education Ministry published the results of RAMA assessments showing that only 3 percent of ninth-grade students met the requirements of the national science curriculum, with another 16% coming close but falling short.

The results also showed that 37% of sixth-grade students met the requirements of the mathematics curriculum, and another 26% partially met the requirements. Meanwhile, just 20% of students in Arabic-speaking schools met the base requirements in a Hebrew language exam last year.

The findings came alongside the release of Israel’s worst-ever scores on the global Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests, with students performing below average in reading, mathematics and science.

Kisch blamed the results on the wars that were raging on multiple fronts when Israeli students took the PISA tests in mid-2025. At the time, Israel was fighting Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Help us report truthfully on social media

As a multimedia journalist, my job is to take the quality, fact-based journalism produced by The Times of Israel newsroom and make it accessible across every platform — from Instagram posts to podcasts to short-form videos.

This is how many, especially young people, consume news these days. But misinformation is rampant on social media. Our team at ToI produces accurate, responsible short-form reporting on Israel and the Jewish world. 

If you believe in the importance of factual social media journalism, please consider joining our reader support group, The Times of Israel Community. Your financial support is essential to sustain responsible multimedia reporting.

— Gabriella Jacobs, multimedia journalist

Support our work Support our work Already a member? Sign in to stop seeing this