On the threshold of 5787, Israel finds itself grappling with alarming findings from this year’s PISA tests, a significant international measure of educational performance. As the election campaign kicks off, the country is faced with a sobering reflection of its educational landscape.
PISA Results: A Wake-Up Call for Israel
The latest PISA results reveal a disturbing trend in the Israeli education system. Some may hastily attribute the dismal performance to the haredi, or ultra-Orthodox, education system, which often lacks comprehensive instruction in critical subjects like mathematics, science, and English. However, the depth of the problem is far broader and more severe. The results indicate systemic failures that affect a much larger portion of the student population, not just specific demographics.
Interestingly, while haredi boys are a significant part of Israel’s education landscape, their representation in the PISA sampling was negligible, with only 3% involved before adjusting for demographic weight. This low participation rate is primarily due to many haredi boys’ schools opting not to partake in the assessments. Conversely, haredi girls displayed stronger performance metrics, yet the core issue lies not solely in participation but in overall educational quality across the board.
Alarming Decline in Core Subjects
The data from PISA 2022 is particularly striking. Israel’s reading scores dropped by 38 points, falling from 474 in 2022 to just 436 in 2025. Mathematics and science scores also showed significant declines, with drops of 25 and 23 points, respectively. These figures represent Israel’s poorest PISA results to date, substantially trailing behind previous assessments from 2012, 2015, and 2018. Alarmingly, Israeli students now perform below the OECD average in all three core subjects.
The ramifications are sobering, especially when considering that nearly half of Israeli students—46%—failed to meet even the baseline proficiency in mathematics, surpassing the OECD average of 35%. Similarly stark trends in other subjects reveal a worrying decline in both average scores and the number of high achievers. The erosion of academic standards reflects an urgent need for intervention.
The Need for Immediate Educational Reform
Underlying these appalling outcomes are student attitudes towards learning and the education system itself. A PISA report indicates that merely 68% of Israeli students expressed curiosity about various subjects, lower than the 73% average across OECD nations. Additionally, a startling 37% of students voiced that school felt like a waste of time, compared to just 24% in OECD countries. This disengagement, coupled with complaints about insufficient educational resources, calls for a critical reassessment of the Israeli education strategy.
Moreover, the situation among Israeli Arab students illustrates a surprising shift toward equality as their academic achievements increasingly align with those in the Hebrew-speaking education system, highlighting a decline in the latter’s overall quality.
As pressures mount on Israel’s educational infrastructure, it is imperative that the government reevaluates its current funding mechanisms and overall strategy. Simply put, modern states cannot afford to finance educational institutions that fail to provide vital instruction in essential subjects like mathematics, science, and English. Ensuring that all educational institutions meet minimum standards should be a non-negotiable prerequisite for receiving public funding. This is a time-sensitive issue that demands urgent attention from policymakers, moving it out of the political bargaining arena into genuine reform.