With some 2.6 million Israeli students set to return to classrooms on Tuesday, a new policy paper warned that public confidence in the country’s education system had fallen to strikingly low levels and called for a sweeping restructuring of how schools are run.
The paper, released by The One Hundred Initiative (Yozmat Hamea) ahead of the September 1 opening of the 2026-27 school year, cited research showing that Israelis gave the education system an average score of just four out of 10, while only 3% of the public believed the system was healthy.
The findings come as approximately 2.611 m. students are expected to begin the school year in 27,757 educational institutions, including nearly 6,000 schools, according to figures presented by the Education Ministry to the Knesset Education Committee last week.
Some 260,000 teaching staff are expected to work in the system.
The school year is scheduled to begin on Tuesday, September 1, according to the Education Ministry.
“In another week, we will send our children into a broken education system,” the One Hundred Initiative wrote in the paper, which was prepared ahead of the new school year.
Highly centralized, bureaucratic, unable to respond to needs of students
The organization described the current system as highly centralized and bureaucratic, arguing that schools and principals lack sufficient authority to respond to the needs of their students and communities.
According to figures from a February 2026 study on national priorities and the education system cited throughout the paper, 61% of Israelis said education was one of the two most important issues on the national agenda, placing it alongside issues such as security and the cost of living.
Parents say schools are disconnected from reality
According to the organization, the study also found that more than 65% of parents felt their child’s school was disconnected from reality.
The crisis extended to confidence in those responsible for making educational decisions: 41.8% of respondents said they did not trust anyone in the system to make decisions concerning their child, the paper said.
The One Hundred Initiative said the figures pointed toward a structural and managerial crisis and argued for transferring significantly greater authority from the Education Ministry to local authorities, school principals and communities.
One of the findings highlighted by the group dealt with the politically sensitive question of teachers’ employment. According to the research, 71% of parents supported giving principals and local authorities greater flexibility to reward outstanding teachers and part ways with teachers deemed unsuitable.
Such changes would likely bring the government into conflict with Israel’s powerful teachers’ unions, the report acknowledged, saying they would require political leaders willing to absorb the resulting opposition.
A 50-30-20 model for Israeli schools
At the center of the organization’s proposal is what it calls a “50:30:20” model, designed to divide responsibility between the state, educational sectors and individual schools.
Under the proposal, 50% of the educational framework would be determined nationally and would include a common Israeli core. That core would encompass subjects such as mathematics, English, science, civics, and history, along with shared civic and national values.
Another 30% would be shaped by the educational stream and local authority, allowing different communities to teach their distinct identity, language and values within the state system.
The remaining 20% would be left to the school itself, giving principals and their communities greater control over teaching methods, educational priorities, staffing, flexible budgets and the skills taught to prepare students for a changing world.
“Autonomy is not privatization,” the paper said, arguing that the state would continue to set standards, establish rules, provide funding and supervise schools while handing day-to-day authority to the local level.
The proposal also seeks to address what the organization described as the fragmentation of Israeli education into four largely separate systems: state-secular, state-religious, Arab and haredi education.
The paper argued that differences in funding, infrastructure, and educational values between those systems had contributed to divisions in Israeli society and called for a common national educational foundation alongside room for the identities of individual communities.
The One Hundred Initiative describes itself as a nonpartisan civic organization seeking to promote a centrist approach to questions of governance and Israeli society. Its Manor Center focuses on education policy and efforts to strengthen public education.
The organization framed the education proposal as a political challenge ahead of Israel’s elections, calling for a broad government capable of carrying out long-term structural changes.
“The public understands that a Band-Aid is insufficient for the education system,” the paper concluded, calling for a government prepared to take responsibility for rebuilding it.