Higher Education Policy, 2012, 25, (87–106) r 2012 International Association of Universities 0952-8733/12 www.palgrave-journals.com/hep/

Is Teacher Education Higher Education? The Politics of Teacher Education in Israel, 1970–2010 Amos Hofmana and Doron Niederlandb a

Beit Berl Academic College, DOAR BEIT BERL 44905, Israel. E-mail: [email protected] b David Yellin Academic College, P.O.B. 3578, Jerusalem, 91035, Israel. E-mail: [email protected]

During the past 30 years, teacher training in Israel has undergone a revolution: the teaching profession has become academic, and since the mid-1980s all teachers were required to attend either an academic college of education or a university in order to acquire a bachelor’s degree and a teacher’s license. Yet, despite this process of academization, the teaching profession has found it difficult to establish itself as an academic field, and teachers constantly have to prove — to themselves, as well as to public opinion — that they are worthy of an academic status. This paper analyses the process of academization of teacher education in Israel, with special emphasis on the policies of the two chief actors in the field — the Ministry of Education and the Council for Higher Education — showing that they traditionally held contradictory perceptions of teachers and of the teaching profession, and that this source of conflict has slowed down the academization process and weakened the profession, thus preventing it from reaching its ultimate goal — the upgrading of the teaching profession. Higher Education Policy (2012) 25, 87–106. doi:10.1057/hep.2011.24 Keywords: teacher training; teacher education; academization; educational policy; history of education; education reform

Introduction The status of teachers and of the teaching profession is a subject of heated public debate in many countries all over the world. There seems to be something about this profession that sets it apart from others: is it because teaching is a ‘mass profession’ with hundreds of thousands of members in each country? Is it because there are no commonly accepted criteria to admit applicants into this profession and to evaluate their achievements? Or perhaps this is because many people feel that teaching is a simple, ‘natural’ human trait, and that ‘anybody can be a teacher’? Consequently, while there is universal agreement that the role of teachers is essential to the well-being of

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society, there is less agreement on how, and in what locations, teachers should be trained (e.g., Beyer, 2002; Bullough, 2002; Haugaklokken and Ramberg, 2007; Beck, 2008; Johnson and Salz, 2008; Cochran-Smith, 2009). A recent study has shown, for example, that despite intensive attempts to reorganize teacher education in all European countries, ‘it cannot be ignored that the core of teacher education has not been subject to substantial reform over the past thirty years’ (Buchberger et al., 2000, 25). In other words, despite the advance in philosophical, sociological and psychological theories of education, prospective teachers today study in much the same way as they did a generation ago. Furthermore, even though in most countries teacher training has been incorporated into the higher education sector, it is still isolated within it. Prestigious universities refrain from dealing with it, and at other universities and colleges it is often considered inferior, catering to those who did not do well in other academic departments (Brisard and Hall, 2001; Hallinan and Khmelkov, 2001; Bates, 2002; Gilroy, 2002; Cochran-Smith, 2004; Maandag et al., 2007). The situation of teacher education in Israel is in many senses similar to that in Europe and North America. Various studies have shown that the Israeli public considers education and teaching fields of the greatest importance, comparable only to that of national security. Public opinion polls constantly show that education is perceived as the most vital of professions, even more than medicine, and more prestigious than a career in law or in the high-tech industry (e.g., Ha’aretz, 2005). Nevertheless, there is a great disparity between this idealistic vision of the profession and the actual status of teachers in Israeli society. Recent years have witnessed a political and economic process that under the guise of educational reform has created serious reservations about the teaching profession and those who practice it. Teachers have been condemned — even by the most senior officials in the Ministry of Education — for their ‘low effectiveness’; they were often described as people who work only a few hours a day, not to mention their many vacations; they were portrayed as possessing no professional standards and even as harmful to their students and hence to Israeli society as a whole. The proof for these sweeping assertions was the low achievements of Israeli pupils in international tests such as PISA or TIMMS. It was not the pupils who were at fault for these poor results, proclaimed the politicians, but the low standard of the teachers (Yogev, 2007, 141–142; Ariav and Kfir, 2008, 335). In this context, attention has been drawn to the teacher training system. In Israel, about 90% of the teachers receive their initial training at specially designated colleges of education (the other 10% of teachers are trained at universities, which provide teacher certificates for high school only). Until the 1970s, these colleges were 3-year professional seminars granting a teaching Higher Education Policy 2012 25

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certificate. Since the late 1970s, these seminars gradually underwent a process that made them into academic colleges granting Bachelor of Education (B.Ed.) degrees after 4 years of study and a professional teaching certificate in several disciplinary fields. Recently, many of these colleges have been accredited to grant Master of Education degrees, and most recently — Master of Teaching (M.Teach.) degrees for graduates of universities. This development is defined in Israeli public discourse as ‘the academization of the teaching profession’. In fact, academization was an extensive attempt to boost the social status of teachers and their public image. The status of the institutions in which teachers receive their training was believed to affect that of their graduates: make the teachers academic and you will have not only better teachers, but also a more respected profession. However, what actually happened seems to be precisely the opposite. The low social status of the teaching profession and the disparity between the idealistic image of the broad-minded educator and the actual situation of teachers in their classrooms gave the colleges an inferior academic status. Instead of the colleges upgrading the profession, it was the profession that downgraded the colleges. Today, 30 years after the beginning of the academization process, they find it difficult to recruit students and are constantly suffering severe budget cuts in what seems to be an endless struggle to prove the very need for their existence. This paper seeks to analyse the process of academization of teacher training by studying the official policies of the two public bodies that govern teacher training in Israel: the Ministry of Education and the Council for Higher Education (CHE). In Israel, all public universities and colleges are accredited and budgeted by the CHE. Colleges of education, however, are accredited by the Council but budgeted by the Ministry of Education. As we shall see, this anomalous situation makes these colleges subordinate to two authorities, which have competing interpretations regarding the teaching profession, thus creating a teacher training system fraught with contradictions. Our aim is to construct a historical narrative that will describe and interpret the development of the academization of teacher training in Israel. Our primary sources are official policy documents, position papers and reports of various committees of different departments at the Ministry of Education and the CHE. We also had access to several reports and research papers published by colleges of education, as well as to some historical studies. All these sources reveal the discursive practices regarding the teaching profession and define the parameters of the State’s involvement in teacher training. Obviously not all policy matters are expressed in public reports, and many specific issues are decided behind the scenes. Yet we believe that public policy reports reflect most accurately their makers’ ideological assumptions, and are thus the best sources for the kind of historical research we conducted. Higher Education Policy 2012 25

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Teacher Training Policies of the Ministry of Education While scattered efforts had been made to academize teacher training programmes in Israel since the 1950s, these efforts had failed. However, the question of the academization of the teaching profession arose acutely in the 1970s, when the Integration Reform set up junior high schools1, and required that the teachers in these schools have an academic degree. This structural reform made the academization of teacher training an urgent task for the education system. The Ministry therefore set up a number of consecutive commissions, which recommended ways to achieve this goal. The Yaffe commission (1971) Emanuel Yaffe, the director of the Teacher Training Division at the Ministry of Education and later the Chairman of the Pedagogic Secretariat, was a key figure and in a sense the architect of the academization of teacher training in Israel. The commission chaired by Yaffe in 1971 had a clear goal — the upgrading of the seminars to the status of 4-year academic colleges of education granting a B.Ed. degree. Yaffe is especially remembered as the author of a memorandum entitled ‘Academization and Humanization in Teacher Training’ (Ormian, 1979, 90–94; Dror, 1991). This memorandum, presented both to the Ministry of Education and to the CHE, largely determined the terms of discourse about the directions of teacher training for many years. From Yaffe’s point of view, the vital question was whether the seminars undergoing a process of academization could preserve their unique character as teacher training institutions and not be perceived as second-rate universities. ‘There must be a balance,’ Yaffe said, ‘between the “academization” of education [y] and the “humanization” of education of Man, the educator’ (Sheinin, 1996, 178). Yaffe’s usage of the term ‘academization’ refers not to the actual academic degree (which was not granted at all by the seminars of his time), but to theoretical studies as opposed to practical training. He claimed that ‘academic’ training for teachers must take on a different character than studies for a bachelor’s degree at the universities. The universities’ aim, he maintained, is neither to produce graduates with broad horizons nor to train educators, but to produce professional specialists in scientific disciplines. In the future colleges of education, he wrote, the standard of studies must be parallel to that required for a bachelor’s degree at the university, but its content must be different and must emphasize — besides disciplinary studies — social and national values, as well as the practical aspects of teaching (Sheinin, 1996, 279). Yaffe disapproved of ‘excessive academization’ to the extent that it became ‘universitization’. In a review before the Knesset (the Israeli Parliament) on the Higher Education Policy 2012 25

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status of teachers, Yaffe (1970, 91) claimed that the academization of teachers must have a unique character: just as doctors are trained to be ‘healers of the sick’ and not ‘healers of diseases’, so teachers ought to be ‘educators of people, and not only teachers of subjects’. He felt that ‘we have reached excessive academization in seminars [y], and it is worth retreating somewhat from it’ (Yaffe, 1970, 36). Some years later he said: ‘The academization process of teacher training institutions must not disregard the existing advantages of these institutions as sites for training teachers’ (Yaffe, 1973, 351). In 1974, at a hearing before the CHE and the Ministry of Education, Yaffe defined the ‘substance of academization’ of teacher training as preservation of ‘the values of the good seminar’ as opposed to ‘the values of the university’ (Yaffe cited by Ormian, 1979, 91). ‘There is no dichotomy between “academization” and “humanization” ’, he said; ‘what I object to is “universitization” [y] [which] is already becoming evident in the seminar’s approach to various fields: studies are becoming more academic [y]. [Future teachers] are trained to become technicians in their fields but not necessarily educators’ (Ormian, 1979, 97). These then were the official views of the Ministry of Education a decade before the process of academization of teacher training actually began. Academization of teacher training was perceived from the very beginning as possessing a different quality from ‘standard’ academic studies at university. This presupposition remained constant ever since. The Etzioni commission (1979) At the beginning of 1979, Education Minister Zevulun Hammer set up the Etzioni Commission (chaired by Judge Dr Moshe Etzioni) in order to ‘examine the status of the teacher and of the teaching profession’. The commission’s report was published towards the end of that year and had immediate and profound influence on the policies of teacher training in Israel. The report declared that the task of the commission was to ‘strengthen’ and ‘raise’ the status of the teachers so that ‘the nation can face the challenges ahead’. The commission stated its belief that ‘the key to creativity in society is in the hands of the educators’. The erosion of the Zionist vision, added Etzioni, stresses the critical role of teachers as ‘the future of the nation’. Therefore, conditions must be created in order to give them job satisfaction and a spiritual challenge so that ‘there will be renewed faith in the power of the vision to become reality’. In order to do this, concluded the report, ‘The teacher must be freed of worries in order to dedicate himself to his calling’ (Ministry of Education, 1979, 3–4). Ornate language of this sort is typical of many public reports on teachers both in Israel and around the world (Fullan, 1996).2 However, after lip service has been paid to teachers and their social mission, there is very little in these Higher Education Policy 2012 25

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reports regarding the lofty spiritual aspects of the teaching profession. Instead, they tend to detail the nature of teacher training, their in-service studies and their salaries in a language that usually demonstrates that the state does not really trust its teachers to carry out their jobs properly, and definitely does not guarantee that they would ‘be freed of worries’ and be able to dedicate themselves to their spiritual calling as educators. The Etzioni Commission referred to the issue of humanization in a very general statement (14), quoting Yaffe himself: the Commission accepts the opinion that along with ‘academization’ efforts should be made to include ‘humanization’ in teacher training: by ‘educating teachers to be people with broad horizons and by training them to be educators’ (Emanuel Yaffe) on one hand, and on the other hand by elucidating the educational aspects of the role of the teacher and the ethical significance of the subjects taught [at school] in terms of educational goals defined in section 2 of the State Education Act (1953). The main part of the report focused on academization as a means to achieve significant upgrading of new teachers and further training of veteran teachers. The report pointed out the need for meticulous selection of students, and for determining ‘clear-cut academic criteria’ with regard to the faculty of teacher training institutions, as well as absorption of ‘teaching forces from the academic world with a pedagogic approach and pedagogic interest’ (12–13). It also mentioned the need ‘to allow teachers without academic degrees the opportunity to attain a full academic education’ and ‘to aspire to academization of in-service training courses’ for teachers (30–31). The Etzioni Report was no doubt a breakthrough in defining the teaching profession as one that must meet academic standards, and was one of the most powerful driving forces for the academization teacher training in Israel. Shortly after its publication, the CHE issued ‘Guidelines’ for the academic training of teachers — a ground-breaking document upon which were founded the colleges of education as we know them today (Council for Higher Education 1981; see below). The Ben Peretz commission (2001) The commission headed by Professor Miriam Ben Peretz of Haifa University was appointed by the Minister of Education Yossi Sarid in May 2000, but submitted its conclusions to Minister of Education Limor Livnat in December 2001. The commission’s brief report (20 pages), entitled Teacher Education in Israel over the Course of Time, does not indicate the size of its membership; it comprised no less than 31 members, 12 of them from the Ministry, 6 of whom from the Teacher Training Division (for the sake of comparison, the Etzioni Higher Education Policy 2012 25

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Commission included only 7 members, none of which were from the Ministry of Education). It seems that the very size and composition of the commission prevented the formulation of an original or revolutionary statement about teacher training. On the face of it, the commission dealt mainly with institutional and structural aspects of the teacher training system, but its hidden agenda was to tackle the problematic relationship between the teacher training colleges and other academic colleges that had sprung up in Israel during the second half of the 1990s. The State’s policy (expressed by the Teacher Training Division at the Ministry of Education) was that only ‘designated colleges’ should train teachers, and such colleges must not teach anything else, while other colleges may teach anything, except teacher training. The main reason for appointing the Ben Peretz Commission in the first place was the demand of a few ‘comprehensive’ colleges (as they came to be known) to be allowed to open teacher training programmes — a demand that was accompanied by a threat to go to the Supreme Court in order to get permission to do so. Thus, the Ministry’s unstated goal was to thwart the comprehensive colleges’ demands and maintain the status quo. The Ben Peretz Commission Report states clearly that the main goal of the academization process — raising the level of prospective teachers — has not been achieved. On the contrary, there has been deterioration. This report, just like the Etzioni Report more than 20 years earlier, stated that there was a ‘continuous and severe decline’ in the status of the teaching profession (Ministry of Education, 2001, 11). The commission recommended ‘a more thorough’ examination of the suitability of students to fulfil teaching roles, suggested raising the admission requirements and advised the implementation of a state licensing exam to be administered at the end of studies (14–15, 18). During the discussion of the report in the Education Committee of the Knesset (10 June 2002), Professor Ben Peretz declared that the commission members were dissatisfied by ‘the level of the students entering the teacher training programs, as well as the level of the students completing these programs and being absorbed into the education system’. Ben Peretz again emphasized that the solution to this matter was to significantly raise the admission requirements, and even considered this an advantage: ‘The harder it is to be admitted’, she said, ‘the greater the appeal and pride will be in having been accepted to teaching studies’. The response of the Director-General of the Ministry of Education to this matter was: ‘I have requested this year that the admission level be raised from 450 to 500 points in the psychometric test’.3 She mentioned that the college principals4 objected to this policy, warning her that it would result in a severe decline of applicants, but she threatened them with budget cuts. ‘We are determined’, she added, ‘that the admission requirements be raised as part of our desire to improve the manpower that enters teaching’ (The Knesset, 2002). Higher Education Policy 2012 25

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During the same discussion, some of the attendees said that the best way to upgrade the teaching profession is to redefine the academic status of the teaching certificate. According to Professor Nehemia Levzion, Chairman of the Planning and Budgeting Committee of the CHE, ‘the matter of the teaching certificate should be dealt with by the CHE, and it should have the status of an academic degree. No institute should be allowed to grant a teaching certificate unless it has been given the authority to do so by the CHE’. In this context, the issue of the transfer of the academic teacher training institutions to the full auspices of the CHE was also raised. ‘The teaching profession is not appealing enough’, said Knesset Member Yehudit Naot during the discussion. ‘I think’, she added, ‘that some [improvement] in the status [of teachers] could be advanced with the transfer of supervision to the CHE, as far as standards and content are concerned’. Such a move would mean that the teacher training colleges would receive their budget from the CHE, and not from the Ministry — and that would entail loss of the Ministry’s control over them. The Ministry therefore strongly objected to such a step, claiming that its direct supervision over the training system was essential for providing teachers for schools and kindergartens, as required by the State Education Act of 1953. Dr Sara Ziv, Director the Teacher training Division, further pointed out — in complete contradiction to the conclusions of the Ben Peretz Commission of which she was a member — that she had no doubt that the academization process of the education colleges has raised the level of both applicants and graduates of the teacher training colleges. Practically, the Ben Peretz Report had no influence on the teacher training system. From the Ministry’s point of view, this stalemate was no doubt a success: the looming danger of comprehensive colleges entering the field of teacher training has disappeared, at least for a while. The Dovrat commission (2005) The Dovrat Commission (or in its official name: ‘The National Task Force for the Advancement of Education in Israel’) was the last in a series of the large commissions established by the Ministry of Education. Its task was no doubt the most ambitious: chaired by businessman Shlomo Dovrat, the commission was requested ‘to examine and assess the Israeli education system and recommend a comprehensive program — structural, organizational and pedagogical — as well as outline means to implement it within a reasonable duration’. As part of its mission, the commission was asked to ‘examine the frameworks for training teachers and their professional development’ (Ministry of Education, 2005, 279). In other words, the Dovrat Commission was asked to recommend a general reform of the state education system from all aspects — an enormous task, never before been attempted in the state of Israel. Higher Education Policy 2012 25

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The commission comprised 20 permanent members, among them several university professors of education, but no representatives of the teacher training colleges or of the Ministry of Education. The explanation for this was that the commission wished to be independent of ‘interested parties’. However, the working teams set up by the commission included people from the Ministry, a few school principals, a few faculty members from the colleges of education and experts in specific fields. The National Task Force was asked to offer a reform that required no additional budget. Under these conditions, there was a critical role for economists and financial advisors. After the publication of the commission’s report, there was an attempt to minimize the role of the business sector in the commission. Nevertheless, the spirit of the business world dominated the proceedings, and the final report was greatly influenced by the prevailing inclinations towards efficiency and privatization, which dominated (and still do) Israeli society. After some flowery phrases praising teachers for their essential role for the advancement of Israeli society (e.g., 16, 123), the National Task Force presented a diametrically opposite view of teachers and their tasks. Teaching, according to the Dovrat Report, is a job like any other. All teaching activities, said the Report, can be preplanned and precisely measured by ‘inputs’ and ‘outputs’. It is therefore possible ‘to direct and manage the education process in such a way as to achieve defined goals [y]; goals and aims must be defined in detail in advance’ (17). ‘Just as all workers in the public sector have well-defined work days and weeks’, emphasized the Report, ‘so the jobs of kindergarten and school teachers must be defined [y]’ (123). Hence, ‘all school workers, including the principal, will clock in and out of the school’ (128). Such expressions of the industrialization of teaching perceive the school as a factory and the teachers as workers on a production line. The Report usage of the expression ‘school worker’ — rather than ‘teacher’ — is an obvious example of its attitude. It is not clear, according to this metaphor, what function is fulfilled by the schoolchildren (are they perhaps the raw materials in the production line?), nor is it clear what ‘product’ the school is producing. The language of the Dovrat Report expresses the social and ideological revolution that occurred in Israel between the 1970s and the beginning of the 21st century — from a society committed to a common ideal to a society emphasizing extreme individualism. ‘Because every child deserves more’ — the slogan of the Dovrat Report — the major policy question is how to ‘produce’ efficient teachers, who will provide the next generation with instrumental knowledge for the advancement of each individual. The traditional conception of teachers as humanists with a broad education, who wish to touch the souls of their students and pass on values from one generation to the next, has completely vanished from the official discourse on education. From now on, Higher Education Policy 2012 25

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the mechanism of international tests and the ‘Measures of School Efficiency and Growth’ implemented by the Ministry at all schools will determine the status of the education system and its ‘workers’. The Dovrat Report takes it for granted that teachers should have an academic education. The undergraduate degree (B.A., B.Sc.) is perceived as sufficient for the required knowledge for teaching at school, yet the Report recommends that teachers gradually study towards advanced degrees enabling them to increase their salaries. The report acknowledges the ‘ethical and social aspects’ of education and mentions the development of ‘emotional and personal skills necessary for interpersonal relationships’; however, no details are given about what these might include (134–135, 144–148). As for teacher training, the words of the National Task Force are few and concise: We recommend a general reform in the program for training school and kindergarten teachers. The teachers must receive full academic training in their discipline (B.A. or B.Sc. as well as a teacher’s certificate) that will include broad pedagogic training as well as complete academic instruction in the field they are studying. The training can be carried out at colleges that will be upgraded to full academic colleges, and at universities that will be required to upgrade their teacher training courses. [y] Admission requirements will be raised in academic teacher training institutions (colleges and universities) (123, 143). Nothing remains of ‘humanization’ in the Dovrat Report, and academization of teacher training veers sharply in a direction that Yaffe and his generation would have called ‘universitization’. The National Task Force has in fact rejected almost all the work that has been done in the academization process of teacher training for over two decades, and hinted that the designated colleges of education were not really academic at all, for if they were, why was there a need to ‘upgrade’ the B.Ed. to a B.A.? Indeed, the report recommends shutting down several colleges of education stating that the budget saved in this manner will be one of the major resources for implementing the reform recommended for the entire education system (144). In the discussion of the Dovrat Report at the Knesset Education Committee, the debate focused on the budgetary aspects of the reform, and there were only minor references to the colleges of education — mainly the demand to shut down several of them and turn those that remain into a kind of university. Dovrat pointed out that his commission found some ‘very disturbing facts’ about the colleges and was troubled by ‘a very low level’ of their students; however, he admitted that ‘it is impossible to improve teacher training because unless the teachers’ salaries are raised, it will be hard to attract quality applicants’. ‘You can raise the level of the colleges’, he said, but when an Israeli Higher Education Policy 2012 25

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teacher ‘receives the minimum wage or less’ one cannot expect to attract quality people to the profession. Nevertheless, Dovrat insisted that raising the admission requirements and ‘full academization’ of the colleges were central elements in his programme. ‘The colleges’, concluded the chairman of the Education Committee of the Knesset, Eitan Shalgi, ‘will be like universities’ (Knesset, 2004). The Minister of Education, Limor Livnat, requested that the reform be implemented as a whole, without excluding a single component. Her aggressive and uncompromising attitude resulted in strong opposition, especially to the teachers’ unions, who refused to cooperate in the demand to dismiss thousands of teachers who were considered, according to the directorate of the Ministry of Education, ‘inefficient for the system’, and organized mass rallies and demonstrations against the Minister. All these factors thwarted the immediate implementation of the reform, even though some of its principals were to find expression in the collective labour agreements signed between the government and the Elementary School Teachers Union (August 2007) and the High School Teachers Organization (January 2011). The teacher training colleges, however, were the only element in the State education system to pay the immediate and high price for the attempt to implement a general reform of the Israeli education system: the budget cuts that the Dovrat Report demanded were systematically carried out, and almost no investment in their development took place since 2005. To summarize, since the beginning of the 1970s, it was clear to the Ministry of Education that teaching must become an academic profession, taught at institutions of higher learning. The policy decision was therefore to transform the teacher seminars into academic colleges. Yet, the Ministry’s strategy was to allow for academization only within recognized boundaries, maintaining its control over them. From this approach stemmed the conservative discourse based on the concepts of ‘academization’ (or sometimes ‘universitization’) as opposed to ‘humanization’. These terms were defined as mutually exclusive and based on contradictory foundations. In this manner, the Ministry could claim that training teachers is unlike training for any other profession, that teaching is something so different and unique because of its humanistic aspects, that only by setting it apart in ‘designated teacher training colleges’ can these special aspects be nurtured. In other words, the Ministry’s political aim — continuous control over the colleges — was veiled in a supposedly ‘humanistic’ language, claiming that university studies are lacking from a humanistic point of view. The result of this policy was an extremely long and trying academization process that has continued for over 30 years achieving very disappointing results, leading eventually to the Dovrat critique hinting that the teacher training colleges must either become ‘real’ or ‘full’ academic institutions or else shut down. Higher Education Policy 2012 25

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Teacher Training Policies of the CHE The teacher training guidelines (1981) Considering the fact that the CHE was given the task of preparing the academization programme for teacher training, it is surprising to discover that the Council’s official documents of the 1970s and 1980s contain no statements about the implications of the academization of the teaching profession for the higher education system. The Higher Education Act itself relates cautiously — to say the least — to teacher training institutions. An amendment to the Act (clause 27) states that some of its articles, which guarantee academic freedom and administrative autonomy to institutions of higher learning, ‘do not apply to an institution for training teachers’ maintained by the State (Council for Higher Education, 1982, 6). This shows that at least at the time this clause was legislated (1972), teacher training seminars were not perceived as potentially academic institutions entitled to the same rights as the mainstream of higher learning in Israel. By the end of the decade, following the Etzioni Commission, the academization of these seminars became a major concern of the Council, and it set up a Permanent Committee for Academic Courses in Institutions for Training Teachers. In 1981, this Committee published ‘The Guiding Model’ (or ‘Guidelines’) designed to establish the ‘basic principles’ of the academization of teachers in Israel. This document — basically a list of subjects and examples of courses that are to be included in all teacher training programmes — immediately became the single constituting model for the entire framework of teacher education in Israel. Every institution seeking academization had to fit its curriculum precisely to this model. The Guidelines first stipulate what might be expected of academically trained teachers: possession of academic knowledge in their teaching subject and in the field of education; familiarity with the practical application of theoretical knowledge; flexibility in teaching methods; ‘critical consumption of research innovations’; and finally, ‘comprehensive knowledge and ability for self-study’ (Council for Higher Education, 1981, clauses 1, 2). According to the Guidelines, the CHE was interested in providing ‘the best possible training’ to candidates of the teaching profession (clause 2a). And indeed, the Council’s demands for awarding a B.Ed. were much higher (or at least much broader) than the demands for a bachelor’s degree in any other field at Israel’s universities: 108 annual hours for the B.Ed., as opposed to 60 annual hours for a B.A. or B.Sc.5 The main reason for selecting the B.Ed. (rather than a B.A. in education or teaching) was to stress the difference between the standard university degree and that to be granted at the teacher training colleges. Publically, it was announced that a special degree for teachers will enhance the Higher Education Policy 2012 25

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profession, providing it with a unique identity, but it was quite obvious that the universities — totally controlling the CHE — opposed establishing competing bachelor’s degrees in the colleges. The Council was mistrustful not only of the nature of the studies at the seminars, which were to undergo a process of academization under its auspices, but also towards the teaching profession itself, which was perceived as dissimilar in many ways to other fields of study at the university, even to fields of applied studies. The traditional professions of the academic world (e.g., medicine and law) were not considered as models for academizing the field of teacher education. In a paper published shortly after issuing the Guidelines, Professor Yosef Dan, Chairman of the Permanent Committee, briefly discussed some of the basic assumptions that the members of his committee had in mind about the teaching profession as an academic field (Dan, 1983, 22–32). Dan raises two basic questions: 1. What does the teacher receive an academic degree for? Is it for disciplinary studies or for professional teaching knowledge? This question is in fact a reformulation of the difference between ‘academization’ and ‘humanization’: do teachers receive their degree for specializing in the particular subject matter they teach, or are they primarily educators, experts in pedagogy, that receive academic training in the teaching profession itself regardless of age level or specific teaching subject? 2. What is academic education? Does it mean a particular scope of studies or learning of a particular nature? Is the difference between academic and nonacademic teacher training only in the number of hours of study or also in the nature of their studies? Dan’s committee did not answer these two questions definitively. It seems that as far as the education of preschoolers and special education teachers is concerned, the Council tended to accept the professional approach to teaching. As for teaching at high schools, it leaned towards the conception of the teacher as first and foremost a person belonging to a particular discipline (Dan, 1983, 22–24). With regard to the substance of academic training, the committee applied a formal definition: academic education (towards a bachelor’s degree) is the level of education that allows those who excel to continue on to a master’s degree (25). There is no discussion whatsoever of the ethical qualities expected of a teacher. It is clear from Dan’s discussion that the members of the Council found it difficult (or perhaps unnecessary) to escape traditional academic discourse: there is an ‘essential contradiction’, says Dan, between academic demands for studies oriented towards research and the teachers’ seminar’s practical approach. While he is well aware of the relative advantages of the intimate Higher Education Policy 2012 25

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framework that teachers’ seminars offer to their students, he nevertheless insists that ‘the first and most natural place to provide an academic education was and remains the university’ (27). In the end, it is clear that according to the CHE the academization process of the teachers’ seminars has a limited horizon. Echoing Yaffe’s idea of ‘universitization’, Dan states that if the academization process creates a tendency of the colleges to resemble the universities ‘in everything’, ‘this would be a total distortion of the program’s goal’ (30). During the 1980s and 1990s, the Council limited itself to the academic examination of curricula submitted by the colleges and accredited several new institutions, most of them quite small, with less than 1,000 students each. The number of academic colleges of education increased from about 12 in the early 1980s to 27 at the end of the 1990s — an unprecedented growth, which is one of the major causes of the crisis of teacher training colleges today. The CHE consistently claimed that it does not set the policy of opening new colleges, but merely responds to requests made by the Ministry of Education, upon whose budget this growth depended. Indeed, the silence (not to say the irresponsibility) of the Council on the subject of teacher training allowed the Ministry of Education to develop an almost completely independent policy in this field, a policy that blurred the academic aspects of colleges as institutions of higher learning and in a sense made them into subunits of the Ministry. By controlling the budgets of the colleges, the Teacher Training Division also influenced the academic content of the curricula, and Council became merely a secondary factor in the authorization of academic programmes. The Ariav committee (2006) The Ariav Committee (named for Professor Tamar Ariav, its chairperson) was appointed to replace the Guidelines of 1981 with a completely new academic programme (Council for Higher Education, 2006, 5). The Committee’s report lists several factors that required a re-examination of Israel’s teacher training system: ‘the enormous changes that occurred in society, in the world of higher education and in the teaching profession’; the sharp decline in applicants to the colleges of education; the disquieting deterioration in the status of the teaching profession, which no longer attracted students with appropriate qualifications as in the past; the change in teachers’ approach to learning, recognizing that teacher training is a continuous process that extends throughout the teacher’s professional career; and, lastly, the economic crisis, which since the late 1990s drastically cut the budgets allocated for teacher training, forcing the colleges to shut down departments and preventing them from supporting comprehensive educational programmes as they did in the past (4). But beyond these reasons, which the report itself outlines, our impression is that an additional motive for setting up the Ariav Committee was the renewed Higher Education Policy 2012 25

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interest of the CHE in teacher training. As we have seen, according to the arrangement crystallized since the beginning of the academization process, the CHE was responsible for accrediting the colleges’ academic programmes, but had no budgetary responsibilities over them. The unsupervised growth of the academic education colleges in the 1990s created an anomaly in the area of higher education, as the budget of a large number of academic colleges (totalling over 20,000 students) was not controlled by the Council’s Planning and Budgeting Committee. The Council was required to approve teacher training curricula having no say in the overall development of the teacher education system. But the major trigger for the CHE’s renewed involvement in teacher training was the appointment of the Dovrat Commission by the Ministry. Dovrat’s work was covered extensively by the media, and teacher training became a subject of intensive public debate. In this context, the Ariav Committee was meant to convey the message that the CHE — not the Dovrat Commission or the Ministry of Education — is the public body that has full authority on all academic matters, including teacher training. By re-emphasizing the colleges’ subordination to the CHE’s academic considerations, the Ariav Committee can be perceived a ‘reconquest’ of teacher training by the institution with exclusive responsibility over higher education in Israel. The Ariav Report — in complete opposition to Dovrat’s definition of the teacher as a ‘school worker’ — begins with a definition of the ‘professional teacher’ as an educator combining disciplinary knowledge of teaching subjects with pedagogic knowledge. This combination is achieved neither by intuition (or natural talent) nor by implementing ready-made ‘recipes’ (as an apprentice learns the secrets of a profession from a master craftsman). The knowledge required for teaching is acquired ‘systematically’, by consolidating cumulative theoretical–research knowledge. From this point of view, good teaching is based on the proper integration of all the components of the teacher’s knowledge — both theoretical and practical (6, clause 1). The Ariav Report expresses no hesitation in defining the teacher as ‘first and foremost a teacher-educator and only then a teacher of a particular subject’. In other words, ‘common core studies exist [...] that cut across age levels and teaching subjects’. These core subjects provide a common professional foundation for teachers (termed ‘Basic Outline’), similar to foundation courses of other professions, such as medicine or law. Specialization in a particular age level or field of knowledge is a further component added on to the common foundation (clause 5). From that point of view, the report recommends that ‘studies towards a teaching certificate will be deemed academic studies’ and fully equates the colleges and the universities regarding the Basic Outline requirements for obtaining a teacher’s certificate. The recommendations of the Ariav Report advance the academization process of teaching in several ways: first, the teaching certificate is recognized Higher Education Policy 2012 25

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as equivalent to an academic diploma; second, teacher training institutions and their faculty must meet the accepted criteria of an institution of higher learning, which will place them on the same ground as schools of education at the universities; and finally, a significant impetus is given to the development of new graduate teaching programmes (M. Teach.), which are likely to attract more academics to this field. The adoption of these recommendations has the potential of opening up a new era in teacher training, which would bring it closer to the mainstream of higher education in Israel. To conclude, the CHE’s discourse regarding teacher training is obviously much less idealistic than that of the Ministry of Education. The Council’s terminology relates first and foremost to the academic requirements in the various areas of study (including education, pedagogy and didactics). Most importantly, there is no reference in the Council documents to any possible contradiction between the academization of teacher training and the affective aspects of the teacher’s work (aspects termed ‘humanization’ in the Ministry’s documents). Nevertheless, the Council’s constant hesitation to consider teacher training as a fully academic field shows that albeit Ariav’s definitions, the council does not consider teaching solely as a body of knowledge, but as a field based on values that cannot be distinctly defined in academic terms.

Conclusions It is quite clear that the Israeli academic colleges of education have been systematically excluded from the mainstream of higher education, that is to say from the entire group of public academic institutions accredited and budgeted by the CHE. As we have seen, while both the Ministry of Education and the CHE have agreed since the 1980s that teacher education should be part of the higher education sector, these same policymakers failed to fully integrate it with this sector. The very fact of the Ministry’s involvement makes these colleges anomalous institutions of higher learning. The Ministry of Health has no say whatsoever in the academic instruction of medical doctors, nor is the Ministry of Justice involved in law schools, yet the Ministry of Education views the teacher training system as its province and is heavily involved not only in budgeting it, but also in academically supervising it. Thus, the voice of the colleges of education is not heard in official public reports regarding the academic world, and from the perspective of the CHE’s Planning and Budgeting Committee they simply do not exist (e.g., Zahor, 2009, states that the origin of academic colleges in Israel is in the mid-1990s!). After more than 30 years of academization, the status of teachers has not improved, and probably even declined. According to some researchers, the academization of teacher education in Israel has merely delayed the total elimination of the teacher training Higher Education Policy 2012 25

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sector, and unless drastic steps are taken their total decline is only a matter of time (Hofman and Kfir, forthcoming, 2012). The European experience has shown that incorporation of initial teacher education into the higher education sector is the final step in a four-stage process (Buchberger et al., 2000, 24): 1. Creation of upper secondary level schools for training teachers in the 18th and 19th centuries. 2. Establishment of post-secondary level institutions for teacher training (seminars). 3. Creation of several types of linkages between these post-secondary level institutions and universities. 4. Incorporation of the separate teacher training institutions into the university sector, or, in some cases, into the higher vocational education institutions. The Israeli teacher training system seems to be somewhere between stages 2 and 3: it is doubtlessly academic, but obviously not fully incorporated into the university sector and evidently fails to create significant linkages with it. Moreover, during the past 15 years there has been an enormous growth of comprehensive colleges, which can teach almost anything except training for prospective teachers. Therefore, the Israeli teacher training system is indeed a sector on its own, segregated in most respects from the mainstream of higher education, with no advantages to be gained from this situation. Is it is possible to change the basic structure of the system, or are the teacher training colleges doomed to remain the outsiders of higher education? Interestingly, the current Minster of Education — although heavily opposed by the Teacher Training Division in the Ministry — has announced a revolutionary change of policy: he stated that some of the colleges of education should be transferred to the budgetary responsibility of the CHE (as recommended by the Dovrat Report of 2005), thus becoming ‘full’ academic institutions, possibly even opening departments in fields other than education. However, several thorny preconditions are required (e.g., the colleges must each have at least 2,200 FTE students; they must merge with other colleges in order to begin the process), which make the outcome of this policy doubtful, possibly influencing only about 20% of the teacher training colleges, which might be able to meet the preconditions following lengthy merger negotiations with partner colleges. In this case, some of Israel’s best teacher training institutions might find themselves in an even worse situation, in which they would be inferior even within the teacher training system, not having access to the superior budgetary and academic conditions that will be enjoyed by those colleges who were able to achieve the transfer to the full auspices of the CHE. Higher Education Policy 2012 25

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Notes 1 Grades 7–9, in which social integration between children of different socio-economic backgrounds was supposed to take place. 2 See, for example, President George W. Bush’s words upon signing the No Child Left Behind Education Bill (2001): ‘I can’t think of any better way to say to teachers, we trust you. And, first of all, we’ve got to thank all the teachers who are here. I thank you for teaching. Yours is indeed a noble profession. And our society is better off because you decided to teach’. (http:// georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2002/01/20020108-1.html) 3 The psychometric test is an admission requirement to all academic institutions in Israel. It is administered centrally, very much similar to the American SAT. However, Israeli applicants need also have a full matriculation diploma. A full psychometric score is 800 points, and the required score to enter a teacher training college was 450 points in the year 2000. Today (2011), it stands at 500 points. The average score of Israeli applicants to institutions of higher learning is about 535 points. 4 The use of the term ‘principal’ here emphasizes the problematic academic position of the colleges of education in Israel. As professional schools for training teachers, they were structured and administered like schools. Therefore, their directors were called ‘principals’, and sometimes ‘college heads’. As the process of academization advanced, they adopted the title of ‘presidents’, but the old terminology referring to them as ‘principals’ still remained in usage, especially in the Ministry’s documents. 5 In Israel, academic credits are often measured in the number of hours one studies for a degree. An annual hour stands for 1 h every week over two semesters. However, beyond the 108 hours demanded by the CHE (which included theoretical studies in education, disciplinary courses and practical training), the Ministry of Education added hours of its own (e.g., a first aid course, language instruction and more). It is also stated in the Guiding Model document (clause 1.2.2.c) that ‘an institution has the right to include in its program studies that reflect its special character’. The colleges therefore added ‘enrichment’ courses that served to express their ideology. For example, colleges training teachers for the national religious network added compulsory hours for religious studies. All this resulted in an enormous load of studies for a B.Ed. — at least twice the load required for a B.A or a B.Sc. Despite these demanding requirements, the B.Ed. had (and still has) low prestige.

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