Will a new education ministry plan help or hinder Israel's Ethiopian students?

A new Education Ministry tender could radically alter the work of mediators who bridge between students and the educational establishment.

Several years ago, Miriam Yitzhak, a mediator who works with Ethiopianpupils in Be’er Sheva, took on three students as a personal project: The three 14- and 15-year-olds were considered leaders of an Ethiopian gang and were failing at least six subjects in school.

“They were blamed for all the school’s ills,” she recalls. “I neglected my family for a while just to prove that these were youths just like any others, who were simply deprived of their needs. I helped get them into an extracurricular club where students get assistance with their homework and I got them extra help, while working closely with their families.”

Yitzhak saw her work pay off when the three students’ grades improved and the number of classes they were failing dropped. Despite this, she says, the principal did not want them in her school. Yitzhak reluctantly arranged for their transfer to other schools “rather than keep them somewhere that doesn’t believe in them.” She kept working with them through graduation. “When one of these students came to visit me wearing the red beret of an Israel Defense Forces paratrooper and the insignia of an officer, I took him to the school that had given up on him.”

Yitzhak has worked for 12 years as a liaison for students of Ethiopian descent in the southern Israeli city. Her job combines expertise in education, social services and intercultural sensitivities, and is meant to bridge between the educational establishment, students and their families. Yitzhak says there are additional cases similar to that of the gang leaders and that she has not given up hope on integrating those students into the school system. That may change, however, thanks to a tender issued by the Education Ministry two weeks ago, which would turn mediators like Yitzhak into contract workers and change their work methods.

In 1994, the Education Ministry worked with leaders in Israel’s Ethiopian community to establish the Steering Center for Ethiopian Immigrants in the Education System, whose role was to help integrate Ethiopian students into school and formulate policies meant to avoid repeating mistakes that were made with previous waves of immigrants who arrived starting in the 1950s. The center runs several programs to meet that end, including overseeing the 55 mediators who work in 140 schools with eight regional inspectors (the center has 70 staffers in total).

The Education Ministry has adopted the mediation approach, although not in full, since the late 1990s. The ministry pays the mediators’ salaries but they are employed by Fidel (“Alphabet” in Amharic), the Association for Education and Social Integration of Ethiopian Jews in Israel, established by Ethiopian and native Israelis in 1997.

The newly issued tender would essentially dismantle the steering center while its employees would work under the aegis of a personnel company, radically changing the way they work. It’s not too far off from the privatization of the health services in schools: The students pay the price, while clerks at the Finance and Education Ministries swear the changes benefit them.

Hannah Elazar Lagassa, a regional inspector who supervises mediators in 20 schools in six central Israeli cities, explains that the role of the mediators and inspectors is “to mediate between the various players in the education system” including, of course, Ethiopian students. “Under the terms of the new tender, we will be unable to do our work according to what we believe and what we can do. These children will not be getting the real help they need.”

The steering center was one of the recommendations of Dr. Chaim Peri, an educator experienced in working with Ethiopian pupils. “Instead of getting rid of the center, the time has come to upgrade and improve it,” he said. According to Dr. Peri, the Education Ministry has tried for years to rid itself of the steering center, which was always a low priority on the ministry’s agenda.

David Maharat, the steering center’s director for the past 13 years, says that, although the center never operated within the Education Ministry, “up until 10 years ago, the decisions regarding immigrant absorption – goals, areas of emphasis and programs – were made in collaboration with us. The public tenders issued in recent years have turned us into an organization that lacks any influence, a trend that is only getting worse. The knowledge and experience that have accumulated over the past 19 years are at risk of going down the drain.”

Last month, Maharat and Fidel representatives meet with Education Minister Shay Piron and senior ministry officials. At the meeting, Piron said he would try to prevent the issuing of the tender and that a committee would be established to find other ways to run the steering center. Although the tender was issued in the end, a spokesman for the Education Ministry has stated that Piron had “turned to the exemptions committee of the Finance Ministry with the request that the tender be canceled” and that the minister believes the mediation service “should be given within the ministry and not through an external agency.” Nonetheless, it is still not known when the exemptions committee will meet or what it will ultimately decide.