Israel's Education System Lacks Professional Autonomy, Unlike Healthcare
Israel ranks first among 35 countries in education spending as a percentage of GDP, but falls to 21st out of 32 in government spending per student, reaching only 82% of the developed countries' average. This indicates that while national investment is high by one metric, the effectiveness of that investment is questionable. The core issue, as highlighted in previous analyses, is not the amount of money allocated but rather the decision-making process regarding its distribution.
A 1994 law governing national health insurance provides a legislative precedent for removing political considerations from decision-making in a large public system. This law achieved this by weakening the power of ministers and their appointees, shifting the focus to independent non-profit health funds, and establishing professional committees to determine annual service coverage, similar to the committee that decides which drugs are included in the health basket. This institutional design, which explicitly defines authority, demonstrates that removing politics from a publicly funded system is technically feasible.
In contrast, the education system has moved in the opposite direction since 1994. It has fragmented into five to seven distinct streams, each with separate curricula, and political involvement has expanded to include content and study plans. Concrete examples include coalition efforts to expand gender segregation in higher education and to enshrine the status of Torah scholars in basic law, both instances where educational decisions were made on a political, coalition basis rather than by professional bodies.
Financially, over 1.84 billion shekels were transferred to the Haredi education sector in 2025 as coalition funds, with "insufficient control, oversight, and regulation," according to the Israel Democracy Institute. While this represents less than 2% of the education budget, the mechanism itself is problematic, as such funds are evaluated against political agreements rather than labor market needs or outcome data. A further concern is that government decisions allow these funds to be absorbed into the permanent budget after ten years, exempting them from future professional review.
Despite a 50% increase in the education budget since 2019, reaching approximately 92 billion shekels last year, classroom density in elementary schools remains 33% above the OECD average, and a significant number of teachers leave within their first five years. This stagnation, coupled with the fact that the teaching skills of Israeli educators are comparable to their international counterparts, suggests the problem lies in resource allocation and decision-making structures, not in the overall budget size or the quality of the teaching staff.
Responsibility for this situation lies with the Ministry of Education, led by Minister Yoav Kisch, and the Ministry of Finance. Minister Kisch acknowledged the "complex but familiar picture" in response to an OECD report, implying no immediate intention for change. Implementing a mechanism similar to the 1994 health law would require defining by law who has the authority to set content and standards, establishing a permanent professional body to decide resource allocation based on outcome metrics, and removing coalition budget items from political channels into a measurable professional process.
