Budgets that were not transferred, standards that were not staffed and difficulty in being able to detect covert dropouts - the State Comptroller's Office gives a negative score to the Ministry of Education and local authorities in preventing students from dropping out of the education system.
The Ministry of Education and local authorities are dealing with the dropout of students from the school bench.
Students who do not find themselves in the system stop coming to school regularly and are expelled from the education system.
Although the dropout rate for high school students in Israel is low compared to OECD countries (5.17% compared to 7.65% for 2018), many authorities still prefer to ignore the problem.
It should be noted that alongside the visible dropout, there is also a latent dropout.
Students who come to school occasionally but do not really study or attend classes (characterized by absenteeism, low academic achievement, a sense of alienation from school, behavioral and social problems, etc.), outbreak of coronary heart disease and transition to periods of distance learning intensified the phenomenon of latent dropout among students.
The main criticism of the Ministry of Education is that even in November 2021, who already knew how severe the covert dropout the Ministry of Education had not finished defining the characteristics of students in covert dropout.
The problem is that as long as there is no definition - the Ministry of Education has difficulty locating and dealing with them.
According to the State Comptroller, Matanyahu Engelman: "An orderly format for locating students who are at risk of covert dropout within schools and reporting them can help return them to a school setting or find a suitable solution for them in alternative settings."
"Find a suitable solution for them in alternative frameworks."
State Comptroller Engelman, Photo: Oren Ben Hakon
To the credit of the Ministry of Education, it is trying to deal with the visible dropout rate, and in 2006 the national average was 0.6%. The highest dropout rate is among high school boys (1.2%), and the dropout rate is higher among boys than among girls of all ages.
The absurdity, however, is that in 2020 the Ministry of Education did not transfer a budget (dropout prevention) budget to any local authority, due to the non-approval of the state budget. NIS 40,000-100,000, no budget has been allocated to the Bnei Brak municipality.
The State Comptroller's Office examined in May-November 2021 also examined what local authorities are doing to locate dropouts from educational institutions and how they were treated.
And of course there are authorities that are not doing enough to prevent dropouts.
Those responsible for dropout students are regular visiting officers (KBS).
Students at risk are supposed to go through a perseverance committee - which aims to support educational institutions and help them accommodate students who are in the process of dropping out.
However, for example, in the municipalities of Nazareth and Kiryat Shmona, students treated by KBS were transferred to study in out-of-school settings, without their transfer being discussed by the perseverance committee.
In addition, there is a shortage of regular visiting officers - although the total number of students in the education systems increased from the 2009-2010 school year to the 2007/08 school year by about 8%, the number of community service positions in the authorities' standards increased by 0.8%. Examined The average number of students treated for CBS exceeds 100 patients - the desired average (in Lod 8 CBS jobs, and the average number of patients for CBS 169; in Mateh Yehuda 4 CBS jobs, and the average number of patients for CBS 114; in Menashe 3.25 CBS jobs , And the average number of patients is 167 for KBS;
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