Tel Aviv—According to the just-released Szold Report, Israel Sci-Tech Schools, the largest independent network of educational charter schools in the country, outperformed Israel’s national average in preparing students for graduation. The report states that Israel Sci-Tech graduates have seen a significant rise in matriculation passing rate (state assessment system) in recent years that has resulted in them overtaking, not only comparison groups from similar socio-economic backgrounds, but the national overall graduate population with a passing-rate as high as 72-percent in 2013.
Charter schools like Israel Sci-Tech aim to grant the same quality of education to every citizen in Israel and reach the low socio -economic and -demographic areas. The report goes on to state that Sci-Tech school 12th grade graduates who continued their studies in years 13-14 constituted around one-fifth of all graduates continuing with such studies. Furthermore, as high as 60 percent of Sci-Tech students are on science and technology tracks in high school, at twice the rate as the rest of the country, shattering the idea of vocational education not yielding significant results.
“We are delighted with findings in the The Szold Report showing how our schools are performing and making a real impact on the students, families and educators that are a part of our system,” said Israel Sci-Tech Schools Director General Zvi Peleg, “While we have monitored our success over the years, this study is very powerful because of its independence. It should be viewed as a real call to action to invest more in private networks like ours that have a very strong track-record of success.”
The Szold Report marks the first time that an educational network outside of the Israeli government has conducted an independent research evaluation, measuring itself against a comparable group and average results from state schools. The Szold Report researchers received permission from the Israel Ministry of Education to fully access education records from 2008-2014. The national average was calculated across all students in regular education, excluding schools under ultra-Orthodox supervision. The comparison group was comprised of graduates in general education who are similar to the Israel Sci-Tech graduates in terms of the distribution of their socio-economic index, the average level of parent education, the sector, supervising body and study track.
The Henrietta Szold Institute is a public, non-profit organization dedicated to serving the Israeli education system and social service system in a number of ways, such as providing scientific and social research to a plethora of entities, designing databases to collect relevant data, developing standardized achievement tests and implementing professional training for teachers, among other things. The Szold Report is available upon request. For more information about the organization, please visit http://israel-scitech-schools.org/.
