Running Head: ISRAELI SPED

Special Education in Israel

Thomas P. Gumpel

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Wed 18 Mar 1998

Thomas Gumpel

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Jerusalem, Israel 91905

Chapter to appear in the Encyclopedia of Special Education, 2nd Edition, NY: Wiley.

Special Education in Israel

The year 1998 marks a special year in Israeli history – it is the State's jubilee year. In its 50th year, the State of Israel is dealing with a myriad of social and political challenges. Currently, we are in the midst of the stalled “Oslo Accords” and are witnessing and increased lack of patience and tolerance from both the Israeli and Palestinian peoples who have grown weary of the continued state of belligerence. Additionally, as Israel becomes a more affluent nation, the very social fabric of our society is being strained as the gap between the rich and poor is widening. As in all nations, these issues are sources of great concern for special educators. The aims of this chapter are modest relative to these monumental issues: I present a short snap-shot of the current state of special education services followed by current and future trends in how our profession is developing as we move towards our next fifty years.

A key element for understanding the current state of affairs in Israeli special education is the Special Education Law of 1988 (SEL). The SEL was intended to mark a turning point in the provision of special education services to children and adolescents with special needs in Israel. The law was passed with wide multi-party support in 1988 with hopes that it would create procedural certainty and codify guidelines where none had previously existed. Examination of the legislative intent of the Israeli parliament (the unicameral Knesset) reveals a basic conceptualization of handicaps among Israeli law makers at the time. The SEL advocates for a segregationist and categorical perception of service provision – a perception in which the educational system is empowered to act to segregate the child with disabilities from his or her non-disabled peers. To illustrate this thesis, I examine current legislative trends in special education policy in Israel. This will be accomplished through a description of the SEL and a discussion of current policy trajectories. First, however, we will examine some general background and census information regarding special education in Israel.

Background Information.

The State of Israel is a small country (20,770 sq. km) with a primarily market industrial and service oriented economy (96.5%). The population of 5.5 million is composed of 82% Jewish and 18% Israeli-Palestinians (Israeli Arabs) citizens with a high literacy rate of 95% among those over the age of 15. The Israeli educational system is broken down into four primary directorates: Jewish Secular, Jewish Religious, (non-Jewish) Israeli-Palestinian and Independent (Jewish Ultra-Orthodox). Each directorate has both a general as well as special education division, each with its own bureaucratic machinery. All public education services in Israel are managed on a national level with several districts (Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Central, Northern, Haifa, Southern). Each district is composed of all publicly funded schools, and is managed by local superintendents under whose domain fall the day-to-day functioning of all pedagogically related activities within each school (e.g., teacher hiring and firing, curricular issues, pedagogic foci). Obviously such a system causes a proliferation of service delivery systems with their concomitantly high costs. Currently in Israel 33,500 children (approximately 2.9% of all school children) are receiving special educational services .

Table 1 presents a breakdown of the number of identified children in the Jewish and Israeli-Palestinian communities and shows that the number of Jewish children being identified as needing special services has steadily decreased over the twelve years between 1984 and 1996, whereas during the same period the number of Israeli-Palestinian children has more than doubled. In the 1996-7 school year the percentages of children from both communities approached parity. This decrease in Jewish children may be attributed to better screening and placement procedures in the more affluent (Jewish) segment of the population. Concurrently, the increase in the number of Israeli Palestinian children is usually attributed to increased budgets as well as the community’s demographic shift from a primarily lower socio-economic rural community to one more Westernized and affluent.

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This change in the provision of services to the Jewish and Israeli-Palestinian communities is further highlighted by Table 2. As can be seen, in the five years between 1989 and 1990 the number of children in the Israeli-Palestinian community increased by 47.4% and the number of special education schools increased by 95.2% versus 4.8% and 10.6% for the Jewish community, respectively. We can, therefore, trace special education policy in two distinct directions: (a) the amelioration of the obvious disparity between the Jewish and Israeli-Palestinian sectors and the measures being taken to achieve parity between these two groups, and (b) policy initiatives implemented in the Jewish special education community which will eventually be implemented in the Israeli-Palestinian community once equality is achieved. For the remainder of this chapter, I have elected to focus on the latter.

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The original bill for the SEL was put forth by a Member of the Knesset from the United Worker’s Party (a socialist party), who cited wide multi-party support for the proposed legislation, including the support of the Ministries of Education and Culture, Labor and Welfare, and Health, as well as Local Government Education Agencies, the National Parents Committee for Special Education, and a bevy of other smaller parents’ committees. The proposing member of the Knesset stated that her bill was intended to organize and regulate the treatment of “those children who were slighted by fate” , and to bring that treatment under the auspices of one governmental body.

The law consists of five subsections: Definitions of Terms, Free Special Education, Diagnosis and Placement, Education in a Special Education Institution, and Miscellaneous. From the law’s opening lines which define the scope of the SEL, the discerning reader will notice several problems. The opening section provides operational definitions and begins with the definition of “the handicapped child” and “special education.” These two definitions provide an interesting tautology: the “handicapped child” is defined as “A person aged three to twenty-one, whose capacity for adaptive behaviors is limited, due to faulty physical, mental, psychological or behavioral development, and is in need of special education” . On the other hand, “special education” is defined as “methodological teaching, learning and treatment granted by law to the handicapped child…” (p. 2930) These circular definitions exemplify the confusion regarding exclusionary versus inclusionary special services: for a child to be defined as “handicapped” he or she must be taught in a “special education” framework which is then defined as a framework provided only to children with handicaps. It remains unclear whether a child can be described as having special needs if he or she is being educated in general (and not special) education classrooms. Moreover, through the examination of Section 3, Chapter B: “The handicapped child is entitled to a free special education in a special education institution in his or her area of residence,” (p. 2930) we have further evidence regarding the legislature’s opinion regarding exclusive vs. inclusive practices as thlaw clear states that special educational services must be provided in a “special education institution.” These statements can be contrasted to the legal mandate regarding placement: “On determining the placement of the handicapped child, the placement board will grant priority to his or her placement in an educational institution which is not a special education institution” (p. 2931). These two positions are seemingly at odds with one another: on the one hand the law seems to clearly state that special education services are to be provided only in special education institutions, while on the other hand, the law gives a clear directive for placement in a general education framework. Currently, the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport has accepted the more restrictive opinion. What was the actual legislative intent regarding inclusive education? It remains unclear and will be left to for the courts to decide.

This issue is further complicated by the strictly categorical nature of Israeli special education. In order to be eligible for services, each child must be classified into one of the 13 special education categories (e.g., “borderline intelligence,” “mild mental retardation,” “moderate mental retardation,” “learning disabilities”). To allow for maximum flexibility, special education services are appended to the child and not the school and all services are provided according to these categories. Categories entitled to fiscal support specifically for integration are presented in Table 3. As we have seen earlier, this policy is based on category membership and complicates the issue of inclusive education for a wide range of children who may benefit from more mainstreamed settings.

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Future Trajectories

No description and of a complex system would be complete without an outline of proposed changes to that system. In the past several years, mounting pressure has been placed on educational policy makers in four distinct areas: (a) definitions of handicapping conditions, (b) placement in special education, (c) determination of the child’s least restrictive environment, and (d) the codification of individualized educational plan requirements. I will now discuss each of these four areas and describe future trajectories.

Due to the limitations imposed by the current budgetary allocation system based on category membership, and due to what is conceived by many as a too-inclusive definition of handicapping conditions (“…faulty physical, mental, psychological or [italics added] behavioral development…,” p. 2930), the types of children enrolled in special education frameworks has changed over the last decade. On the one hand, children with learning disabilities and other mild learning handicaps are being served in the regular classroom rather than being shunted over to the special education system. On the other hand, the legal definition of handicaps allows for referral to special education services solely due to behavioral problems. This legal loophole was closed recently as the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport began to require that the general education system deal with children with behavioral difficulties without referring them out. Closing this loophole completely will require improved teacher training and a streamlined procedure for tendering assistance to the child and to the general education teacher.

As is common in special education service provision, services can be seen as being divided between consensual special education groups (e. g., multiple, severe or sensory handicaps) and non-consensual special education groups (e. g., learning disabilities, mild mental retardation). The structure of special education placement is changing as the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport strives to limit the number of children being placed in segregated settings through two maneuvers: (a) not formally identifying them as children with special needs (and hence not bringing them before the Placement Committee, thereby circumventing the restrictive budgetary aspects of the law), and (b) establishing a series of decentralized resource centers in each community in the country. These Local Support and Resource Centers (LSRC) serve only the non-consensual handicap categories and function in a semi-autonomous manner and are able to allocate resources according to specific local needs. The LSRCs are changing the very nature of service provision in Israel: special education teachers are no longer associated with specific schools, but rather with their LSRC. In this way teachers and para-medical services are provided from within an itinerant consultative/collaborative framework. Currently, LSRCs are operating in selected communities throughout the country, and expanding rapidly. Little empirically controlled data, however, is being collected regarding the efficacy of the LSRCs; hopefully, this too will pass.

The LSRC system is designed to primarily benefit school children from the non-consensual special education groups. A concurrent improvement in the provision of services to children with consensual disabilities is less noticeable. A firm and clear mandate to strive for each child’s education in his or her own least restrictive environment would help to substantially rectify this problem. These children are now almost exclusively educated in segregated special education systems with individual schools having a wide range of autonomy in deciding curricular and transition issues. Legislative intent regarding exclusionary versus inclusive education must be clarified and made less categorical.

Traditionally, Israeli general education schools have relied on strong central curricular guidelines, leaving the general education teacher with little leeway to make key curricular decisions. Such has not traditionally been the case in the segregated special education system, where, historically, emphasis has been placed primarily on remedial education. The Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport’s Special Education Division is currently developing strict Individualized Educational Plan and accountability procedures. The Ministry has also recently begun to focus attention specifically on transitional issues for adolescents.

It is by all accounts an exciting, yet confusing, time to be involved in special education in Israel. Perhaps never before during the 50 last years has the provision of special services to children with handicaps undergone such rapid changes as during the decade since passage of the SEL. Currently, the new national director of the Division of Special Education in the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport is dynamically revamping the Ministry’s foci and is creating a professionally rich and engaging work atmosphere. Special education in Israel, however, remains highly categorical and segregative and hence has a long way to go.

References

Captions

Table 1: Number of pupils registered as having special needs by sector.

Table 2: Number of special needs schools by sectors.

Table 3: Categorical Funding Breakdown by Disability according to Israeli Special Education Master Plan

Year	% of Total	Total	Jewish (% of Total)	Israeli-Palestinian (% of Total)
1984-85	3.7	35.7	32.9 (4.3)	2.8 (1.5)
1989-90	3.5	34.9	31.1 (3.9)	3.8 (1.9)
1994-95	3.3	38.3	32.6 (3.5)	5.6 (2.5)
1996-97	2.9	33.5	27.7 (2.9)	5.8 (2.3)