1. SHATIL: Organizational Background

SHATIL, The New Israel Fund's Empowerment and Training Center for Social Change Organizations in Israel, promotes democracy, tolerance, and social justice. Established in 1982, SHATIL serves as a capacity-building center that provides training, consultation, coalition-building assistance and other services to over 1,000 nonprofit organizations in Israel each year. With headquarters in Jerusalem and branches in Beer Sheva, Haifa and Lod, SHATIL has been on the front lines of the struggle for social change in Israel for over twenty years. SHATIL empowers people and in particular disenfranchised people with the tools to improve their lives and communities; reaches out to strengthen constituencies on the economic and geographic periphery; facilitates coalitions among people of diverse communities; and fosters the building of institutions to promote long-term social change to benefit all Israelis.

2. Context: Education and Equality in Israel

Affecting a key element of individual and community development, discrimination in education has particularly serious consequences. At present, the city of Haifa has two distinct educational systems: one for Arab students and another for Jewish students. While the Arab educational system serves a significant population - approximately 9,000 students in total - it remains substantially inferior to that which serves Haifa's Jewish children. The Arab school system lacks basic facilities, equipment, and resources such as adequate numbers of classrooms, teachers, and trained paraprofessionals. For instance, although Haifa has nearly the same number of Jewish and Arab elementary school students, the allocated facilities afford each Jewish student 13.82 square meters of space while allocating roughly half that amount - a mere 7.73 square meters - for each Arab student. Fundamental changes in public policy and practice must happen to equalize educational opportunities for Arab and Jewish children in Haifa.

To address this situation, in 2002 SHATIL initiated the Equality in Education Project in Haifa. The Project aims to:

    * Renew and improve the city's Arab education system

    * Close gaps in the quality of education between the Arab and Jewish sectors

    * Develop parental activism and leadership

    * Build partnerships among parents, the municipality and the education administration.

During the 2003-2004 academic year, SHATIL provided consulting, training and group coordination services that led to achievements exceeding all expectations. The project has in fact begun a virtual revolution in Arab education in the city of Haifa, prompting the city's joint Jewish-Arab parents' committee to request SHATIL's assistance in reforming overall municipal education. This report will briefly present the outcomes of the project this past year.

3. Project Achievements

Formation of a Steering Committee

SHATIL recruited and established a heavyweight steering committee to head the initiative to reform Haifa's Arab schools. Professor Aliza Shenhar, who holds the Arab education portfolio in Haifa, serves as director of the steering committee that comprises 35 members including parents, public and municipal officials, principals, and teachers. SHATIL assisted the steering committee in establishing six subcommittees to cover: early childhood education; primary education; secondary education; special education; private schools; and a unique pilot initiative to turn the Halisa elementary school into a center for community activity. Throughout the year, SHATIL maintained contact with the heads of the six subcommittees and provided professional consulting and guidance on a variety of issues including how to organize and recruit the community, what kinds of projects to develop, what kinds of specialists to involve, whom to approach and how.

Raising Funds from the Municipality

Together with a parents committee that SHATIL established in the first year of the project, SHATIL succeeded in pressing the municipality for funding to implement reforms in Arab education services. Through an intensive campaign that included letter writing, meetings and using the media as an advocacy tool, SHATIL effectively raised a budget of 480,000 NIS to begin implementing changes in Arab education.

Creating a Plan for Immediate Action

Together with the subcommittees, parents committee and the Director General of the Haifa Municipality, SHATIL created a plan for immediate action, based on the approved funds, that consists of the following elements:

    * Increasing the numbers of Arab high school students eligible for matriculation certificates by identifying students at risk of not matriculating, forming them into small groups, and providing additional teacher assistance

    * Decreasing gaps between Arab students in primary school by identifying less academically successful students and developing a specialized assistance plan for each student

    * Reinforcing special education services for Arab students with special needs and increasing and improving testing procedures for children with learning disabilities

    * Implementing a plan to transform the elementary school in the Halisa neighborhood into a center for the community by opening the school for longer hours each day and using it to house activities for the benefit of the Arab community

After devising the plan, SHATIL guided efforts by the subcommittees, related education officials, parents and other activists to begin implementing and advancing each of the workplan elements during the remainder of the school year.

Promoting a Public Campaign to Close the Arab Middle School

While the performance of Haifa's Arab schools lags across the board, the middle school - for grades 7 and 8 - stands out for its particularly acute problems: high rates of violence and crime among the student population, along with seriously inadequate academic achievements. Until the end of sixth grade, Arab students in the public school system attend the school closest to their neighborhood, with a total of approximately 200 peers. Yet at the end of sixth grade these students must all travel from their own neighborhoods to one large middle school in the downtown area (sometimes an hour long commute), where they find themselves together with students from all over the city. In addition, the system throws these students together with a large proportion of highly problematic students: those expelled from the private school system for misbehavior at the end of the elementary grades.

SHATIL and the parents committee, along with other education and community activists, campaigned for the municipality to close down the middle school and integrate grades 7 and 8 into the elementary schools. This would enable students to continue learning with those they have grown up with, close to their own homes and in the familiar surroundings. It would also solve the problem whereby one single school must manage a large influx of problematic students.

In this campaign, the SHATIL-led parents committee met with astonishing success in April in the form of a public declaration by the Haifa municipality that it intended to close down the Arab middle school. Yet shortly after making this announcement the municipality backed down from the important decision. Fueling this backpedaling was the Haifa education department's insistence, supported by the Ministry of Education, that it would only close the middle school by the start of the 2005-2006 academic year rather than by the start of the upcoming year.

With SHATIL's guidance, the 15-member parents committee convened to discuss alternatives for responding to this revocation of a key promise. After intensive discussions and analysis, the committee decided not to capitulate on this crucial issue; rather, it would launch a massive protest campaign in opposition to the reversal of the municipality's decision. Putting into action the leadership and organizing skills taught by SHATIL, the parents committee proceeded to convene meetings with all of the parents of Arab students in the city who had just completed sixth grade. These meetings presented the rationale for closing the middle school and recruited parents' support for the campaign. In a powerful tactic and with inspiring unanimity, the committee succeeded in persuading parents of sixth graders not to register their children in the Arab middle school but to register them in local Jewish schools, as reported by the national daily Haaretz on July 14, 2004.

Yet in response to this declared intention, director of the Haifa district education department Aaron Zbeda informed the committee that he would forbid a "block transfer" of Arab students to Jewish schools. Moreover according to Zbeda, and as further reported in Haaretz, the school registration rules for Jewish and Arab students were laid out in municipal regulations from 1959 according to which Jewish students are divided by geographical residence, while the Arab students all belong to a single, non-geographical division. This led to, among others, nationally covered statements by the parents committee protesting state-endorsed inequality between Arab and Jewish students, a question submitted to the Knesset by an outraged MK, and a discussion in the Knesset regarding racism in Israel.

Under this public pressure, the Ministry of Education agreed that Arab students could in principle register at the school of their choosing, but asked the parents committee to offer an alternative solution to that of having all the Arab students register at Jewish schools. In response, the SHATIL-guided parents committee devised a compromise according to which this year's seventh grade Arab students will be under the jurisdiction of the existing Arab high school as an interim measure, and in the following year (2005-2006) they will integrate with the Arab elementary schools. While the Ministry of Education has since indicated that it would not close the troubled middle school, the Haifa municipality and the SHATIL-advised committees remain confident that the Ministry will reverse that decision in the face of continued advocacy.

Committing Haifa to Educational Reform

At the same time, SHATIL and the parents committee prepared a list of essential demands for reform in Arab education in the city and presented such to the Haifa municipality. Three of these most important demands met with municipal approval:

    * Investment of 1,500,000 NIS a year for three years to upgrade the city's Arab education services

    * Establishment of a post-elementary school for students with serious behavioral challenges

    * Establishment of two new preschools for children with special needs

By agreeing to meet these pivotal demands, the Haifa municipality in effect promised to substantially reform Arab education in the next few years, in accordance with the campaign waged by SHATIL and the parents committee.

In an additional encouraging development, the municipality responded to parental demands to strengthen weaker students in the system by providing supplementary teacher support. In just three months, the program produces tangible statistical improvement among the affected students. The combination of parental involvement and educational reinforcement allowed otherwise underachieving elementary school students to approach parity with their more gifted peers.

As an unexpected result of SHATIL's campaign, the Ministry of Education allocated substantial sums to the private education sector to enable those institutions to retain problematic students whom the schools would otherwise dismiss. The campaign thus created - unintentionally - unexpected allies in the continuing struggle for holistic educational reform.

In January of this year, Mayor Yona Yahav, Professor Shenhar and approximately a hundred parents, educators and community activists attended a conference on Haifa Arab education. Organized by SHATIL and the parents' committee, the conference outlined the revolution in the city's Arab education system and what lies ahead. In his remarks, Mayor Yahav cited SHATIL's project as the force behind his personal commitment to improving Haifa Arab education, a principle he had made central to his election campaign platform.

Empowering Parents

These events demonstrate the level at which the parents committee actively assumes responsibility for promoting educational reform, taking on initiatives that effect real change. Under SHATIL's guidance, the parents committee has blossomed into a semi-independent entity that manages to maintain ongoing contact with its membership, communicate regularly with both the Hebrew and Arabic media, and effectively advocate to members of Knesset and other decision makers to benefit the Arab community in Haifa in real terms.

In addition to guiding and assisting the parents committee, this year SHATIL conducted a number of workshops and courses to help empower parents, impart leadership and organizing skills, and build cooperation between parents and their children's schools. To this end, SHATIL joined with the Haifa municipality and the psychology department of the Ministry of Education and developed a training course for kindergarten teachers in areas that include education, health, and psychological welfare. The first cycle of the course began in January 2004 and became a mandatory element in the training of Haifa kindergarten teachers. SHATIL further conducted a program to organize and empower mothers of Arab children in the Achva elementary school, among the poorest and weakest of the city's Arab schools. The program continued in the new school year, providing 12 mothers with facilitated weekly meetings on issues related to women's empowerment such as domestic violence in the family, parent-child relationships and the reassertion of parental authority, and the status of women in Arab and Israeli society. As testimony to the novelty and importance of this program, the local welfare department asked SHATIL to conduct a similar program for mothers in the school in Halisa, and has agreed to provide funding for the initiative.

Inspiring Broader Change

Further validating SHATIL's efforts, recently the municipality's joint Jewish-Arab parents' committee approached SHATIL and requested assistance in organizing and implementing a campaign to improve the overall municipal education system. The group recognized the impact of the Haifa Arab Education project and the extent to which SHATIL's programs to foster bottom-up change achieve real results. Project Coordinator Shahira Shalabi has developed a tentative program with the committee for promoting citywide education reform, especially following the government's adoption of the Dovrat Commission's recommendations for national education reform. As the project progresses, SHATIL will evaluate the type and extent of involvement. In a similar vein, the principals of religious public schools in Haifa have contacted the project coordinators to explore implementing similar reforms in their system; the project's dramatic successes have breached cultural barriers. As Ms. Shalabi put it, "This is a unique and fascinating model, because of the initiative that comes from the field and forces itself upon the system with great power and professionalism…it constitutes an example of public empowerment of the Haifa Arab community, and has become a model of social change that springs from the field and affects the entire system."

4. Looking Ahead

The enormous success of the project this year is fivefold:

    * Creation of a movement of empowered, organized Arab parents to assume leadership of the initiative for educational reform

    * Establishment of an ongoing dialogue between the parents committee and local municipal and education officials

    * Recognition by the Haifa municipality and the Ministry of Education of the existence of serious problems in its Arab education system

    * Commitment by the municipality to take concrete steps to rectify these problems.

    * As noted above, requests from the municipal Jewish-Arab parents' committee and the public religious school system to assist in development and implementation of a citywide educational reform program.

While SHATIL finds the direction of this project heartening, only follow-up activity will ensure that the municipality and the Ministry of Education fulfill their commitments. In addition, the municipality has not yet agreed to undertake several important demands for reform, such as:

    * Establishment of a second Arab high school in the city to allow for one high school to specialize in teaching students with serious behavioral difficulties

    * Opening of an additional elementary school to mitigate overcrowding in the existing schools

To this end, SHATIL will continue to coordinate and provide consulting to the parents committee in order to guide it in further advocacy efforts. At the same time, SHATIL will assist the parents committee in furthering its independence; with SHATIL guidance it has registered as an amutah (official nonprofit organization). The committee has set an ambitious long-term agenda of eventual nationwide assistance to similar bodies in other cities; SHATIL will continue to make itself available for that purpose. SHATIL will also continue to develop and implement training programs for parents in individual schools to cultivate greater leadership and organizing skills, and strengthen the growing reserve of empowered and activist parents.

Additional goals for the near future include:

    * Advocating for implementation of the law mandating free child care from age three.

    * Monitoring the systemic changes called for in the Dovrat educational reform package, and lobbying teachers to support its implementation.

After more than two years of generous support from the Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston, SHATIL's Equality in Education in Haifa has created new levels of parental leadership and activism, built partnerships between parents, the municipality and the education department, and elicited new financial resources and concrete steps from the municipality to improve education services for the Arab community. Given the importance of education and its centrality to the development of a strong, informed and responsible citizenry, this project continues to fill a critical role in promoting democracy. SHATIL remains committed to seeing the project through another year to further solidify the momentum towards reform, and to develop and implement an exit strategy by the end of 2005. The exit strategy will involve further training and consulting for the parents committee to strengthen its independence and make it possible to leave the future of Haifa's Arab education in the capable hands of the city's parents.