Musharakh-Networking for policy changes to promote Social Inclusion and Respect for Diversity in ECC

Prepared For: The conference on Equity and Respect for Diversity in the context of Children's rights

Al-Tufula Center: Early Childhood Education and Multipurpose women centre

March 2009

Table of content

• Historical Background

• Some facts representing the current situation

• Some facts concerning the Education in General

• The Palestinian ECCD Field

Historical Background

Following a history of colonial rule by a succession of foreign forces After the ending of Ottoman control over Palestine the British Mandate took over the control of Palestine. In 1917 Belfor Declaration was issued stating the right of the Jews to establish their own state in Palestine. During the British Mandate many Jews especially from Europe succeeded in entering to Palestine. The Palestinian struggled against the plan using different tools including strike, and other political and military strategies. The newly formed United Nations General Assembly voted in 1947 to partition Mandatory Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab, with special international administration of Jerusalem. The partition plan recognized the self-determination rights of both nations, while preserving the right of existing populations to remain on their lands, regardless of the envisioned new borders. Amidst tensions between Jews and Arabs in the area, Israel declared statehood in May 1948, which led to continuing fighting.

In what became known to the Palestinians as “al-Nakba,” the catastrophe, the vast majority of the 940,000 Palestinians who lived in what became Israel were expelled or fled from their homes, hoping to come back when the fighting were over. The displacement and dispossession resulted in 780,000 refugees, 480 destroyed villages, confiscation of the land and other means of distraction causing the distraction of the Palestinian infrastructure. The 160,000 Palestinians who were able to stay were given citizenship status in the newly-established State of Israel, whose borders were defined by the 1949 UN-brokered armistice lines.

At the outcome of the war, the majority Palestinian population has been reduced to a debilitated and persecuted minority. More than 480 Arab villages were destroyed, a quarter of the remaining Arab population was transformed to internal refugees, and families were divided by newly defined international borders. The 1967 Israeli-Arab war created a second wave of displacement with more than 500,000 Palestinians, nearly half of whom were already refugees, uprooted again.

Today, the 1.3 million Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel live in three concentrated regions in Israel, the Galilee (a rural area in northern Israel), the Triangle (an area in central Israel adjacent to the border with the West Bank) and the Naqab (Negev) (arid lands in the south). Israel includes between 228,000 and 249,270 Palestinian Arab permanent residents of annexed East Jerusalem as part of the total Arab population in Israel. About 63% of the community lives in villages, including 8% in “unrecognized” villages in the Naqab and Galilee, 29% live in small municipalities, mostly in the Triangle area, and 8% live in mixed Arab-Jewish urban centers. Religious affiliation is primarily Sunni Muslim (1.1 million) with Christians numbering 113,000 and Druze 106,000.

Some facts representing the current situation

Palestinian citizens of Israel comprise approximately 20%, or a little over 1 million of Israel’s population. Palestinian children citizens of Israel comprise 25% of all children living in Israel. This national minority is discriminated against on a number of levels, through laws as well as government policies. This discrimination is affecting all spheres of life and creating huge gapes between the Jewish and Arab citizens in Israel. Poverty is only one example: 57.5% of Arab children are living under poverty line.

Palestinian citizens of Israel are not a monolithic group. They live in a variety of cities, towns and villages throughout Israel, including the unrecognized villages, mixed cities, and Palestinian villages, and within secular and a variety of religious communities (Muslim, Christian, Druze).

About 50,000 citizens in the Negev, and some 30,000 other Arab citizens across the country, are considered illegal residents of their 200-400 years-old villages, which the State did not recognize or place on any maps. The Government of Israel does not recognize many of these villages as legitimate. The unrecognized villages lack public services, such as an educational framework for preschool children, elementary and high schools, paved roads, public transportation, electricity, in many cases running water, garbage collection and disposal, telephone connections and community medical services.

The situation of the recognized Arab localities in Israel are also effected by the long year of discrimination policies and they when scaled by the CBS in Israel according to socio- economical scales from 1 to 10 where 1 is the lowest and 10 the Best localities. 95% of the Arab localities are scaled in the lowest 4 scales as demonstrated below:

Table 1: Arab and Jewish Municipalities according

to the Socio-economical Scale

Socio-Economical Scale Total of Villages and Cities Arab Jewish

Socio-Economical Scale

Total of Villages and Cities

Arab

Jewish

Awraq Musharaka Table 4, P 27, Indicating # 1 at the bottom on the scale.

The state, to date, failed to provide meaningful or effective programs to eliminate discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel. Although the state policy impacts all citizens and all spheres of life, however the most affected groups in our society are women and children.

Some facts concerning the Education in General

Since the establishment of the state, governmental policy toward the discriminatory practices against Palestinian Arab school children that are institutionalized in its educational system place Israel in violation of its international legal obligations; such as the Convention for Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), Convention for Children’s Rights (CRC), the Convention for Elimination of all kinds of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), etc according to which Israel is obliged to offer effective protection against discrimination to all of its citizens, and special safeguards for the rights of minorities and children.

Discrimination and inequality in education versus Arab Palestinian population today is a recognized fact, as expressed in the Dovrat Report, in High Court rulings, in Knesset committees, and in statements by top officials in the education system. This inequity has severe implications in regard to the ability of young Arabs to integrate in society and become productive and useful citizens with a chance to advance in society on the basis of their qualifications.

Lack of Equality in education

The social worldview of the developers of the Equality Index selected Indicators and variables for monitoring equality in education. It expresses equality of input and equality in educational output.

The Table below presents these Indicators and variables in the Hebrew education system and the Arab Education system.

Table 2: Indicators and Variables for monitoring Equality in Education

Indicator Variable Arab Education Hebrew Education Notes

Resource of the Education System 1. Average number of pupils per classroom in elementary education 29.3 24.3 starting point in Arab education is already lower than in Hebrew education

2. Average number of pupils per classroom in secondary education 30.7 28.9

3. Average number of pupils per classroom in elementary and secondary education 29.8 25.8

Pedagogical Infrastructure 4. Average number of full-time teaching positions per classroom ( by population group) 1.8 1.9 Additional variables, such as the

percentage of under-achieving students who receive learning assistance, teaching

resources (library, computers, study areas), were not included in the current

Equality Index due to the lack of availability of continuous data.

Out-Puts 5. Percentage with 0-8 years of schooling 30.3 10.8

6. Percentage with 13-15 years of schooling 10.8 23.3

7. Percentage with 16 years or more of schooling 8 19.6 about 20% of the Jewish population, compared to only 8% of the Arab population, completed 16 years or more of schooling

8. Median number of years of schooling in the population 11 12.6

9. Dropout rate among pupils in grades 9-12 8.9 4.6 Almost as twice

10. Percentage of 12th graders qualifying for matriculation certificate 48.7 5.6 about 7%

11.Percentage of 12th graders with a matriculation certificate that meets entrance requirements for university 29.6 46.4 About 17%)when it comes to

matriculation certificates that meet university requirements (46.4% in Hebrew education, compared to 29.6 percent in Arab education).

12. Percentage of students in university among ages 20-34. 3 9 related to the percentage of dropouts

The social worldview of the developers of the Equality. Data from the Central Bureau of Statistics.

Furthermore, the Ministry of Education (MOE) severely under-funds schools for the Palestinian minority in Israel. Statistics published in 2004 reveal that combined public and private investment in Palestinian school students stood at an average of 862 New Israeli Shekels (NIS) per student, compared with NIS 4,935 per Jewish student for the academic year. The government spent over 5.73 times as much on each Jewish student as on each Palestinian student. This under-funding is manifested in many areas, including the poor infrastructure and facilities characteristic of Palestinian schools , crowded classrooms , few teaching hours relative to Jewish students, the lack of support and management professionals in the Palestinian educational system in Israel, and poor Arabic textbooks. This environment creates a negative experience for students, academically, emotionally and socially, and leads to phenomena such as academic under-achievement and high drop-out rates.

Children with Special needs

The Special Education Law – 1988, it is the state policy of the Ministry of Education (MOE) is to integrate children with special needs into the regular educational system.

The right to learn in the general educational framework is part of the greater right of people with disabilities to take part in communal life and its activities as full and equal members of society. Inclusive frameworks fall directly in line with the currently accepted educational approach - that it is essential for children with special needs to acquire normative behavioral skills, while at the same time it is necessary to create a more tolerant society.

Palestinian Arab children who are diagnosed with "special needs" rate higher than Jewish, and they also have higher rates of severe impairment, 5.4% of all children versus 3.3 percent. About 7% of Negev Bedouin are hearing impaired, compared with 3% of the general Israeli population. But these numbers still underestimate the rate of impairment among Palestinian Arab children,

Despite higher rates of Impairment, Palestinian Arab children receive proportionately fewer special education resources than Jewish children. According to official data from the Education Ministry, it allocated only 10.8 percent of the total special education hours to Palestinian Arabs in 1996, by 1999-2000 it had increased their share, but only to 14.1 percent, with 2 percent of the total to Bedouin.

Table 3: Distribution of Teaching Hours for Special Education

Teaching Hours for Special Education Jewish schools Arab schools

Weekly special education hours for primary and secondary levels 1999-2000 85.9%

(288,662)

14.1%

(47,342)

Weekly hours for integration 1998-1999 91.60% 8.40%

(75,819) (69,992)

Golan, Closing the Gaps in Arab Education in Israel, p.3.

Tens of thousands of Arab children with special disadvantages (disabilities, etc.) do not have suitable schools or classes to meet their needs. Hundreds of children with special needs do not attend school at all.

The Ministry of Education has not provided Arab students sufficient educational enrichment programs for both children with impairment and gifted students. Jewish teachers receive a significantly larger amount of training for special education integration than do Arab teachers. There are 61 integrated kindergartens for Jewish children but 0 for Arabs. In addition, there are 484 separate special education kindergartens for Jewish children but only 45 for the Arab Palestinians.

Culture and identity issues

The MOE retains centralized control over the curricula for Palestinian schools and Jewish secular schools. The State Education Law sets the educational goals of the state educational system, which emphasize only Jewish history and culture; mandatory subjects for all students who take the matriculation examinations at the end of high school include, for example, Jewish religious texts. The structure has no policy to promote Social Inclusion and Respect for Diversity especially when dealing with the Palestinian national minority. Palestinian students are even denied their right to develop a positive cultural and national identity.

The Palestinian ECCD Field

Education and psychology scholars agree upon the important role which early childhood has in building the individual’s personality. Therefore the Field of early childhood care development (ECCD) demands worldwide attention. Studies have demonstrated how efficient it is for the society as a whole to invest in ECCD. The child’s first years are considered a crucial period, particularly when it concerns the cerebral development.

Israel is considered to be very developed regarding ECCD, especially concerning laws and services, however, this valid in the Jewish communities only. For historical background, ECCD educational services fall under the responsibility of tow ministries:

• The Ministry of Industry Trade and employment

• The Ministry of Education.

The Ministry of Industry Trade and labor: ages Birth - 3

The ministry of commerce, industry and employment deals with the educational frameworks for early childhood, not necessarily for the sake of ECCD, but as a mean of supporting working mothers. Under the Ministry responsibilities falls the following:

 Support working women and provide subside in Nurseries and home nurseries fees.

 Set the rules for payment in the nurseries and home nurseries

 Approve the Nurseries and provide them with license.

 Supervise the work in the Nurseries.

 Supervise the home nurseries.

According to the law each working women could receive subside in accordance with the family income given she is working women and her child is visiting a recognized nursery.

According to the Ministry, of the 1,665 daycare centers, which have recognition, only 31 centers operate in Palestinian villages equaling only 1.86%. They provide service for 1700 Arab child that is 2.1% of the total children in that age. Another 2500 Arab children aged 0-3 attends publicly subsidized house care programs.

Ministry of education: 3-5

The Ministry of education- ages 3-5 is responsible for; funding together with the local authorities, the opening and running costs of the KGs for this age, the supervision of all public and registered private educational institutions for children aged 3 and upward, curriculum development, and Pre-school teacher training. The Arab education public system as mentioned above has separate curriculum and institutions. All decided upon and managed by the MOE. Other ministries have other roles in ECCD; The ministry of health deals with pre and post-birth health issues, The welfare Ministry with children at risk

The Free Compulsory Education Law (1949), amended in 1979, requires all children between the ages of five and sixteen (kindergarten through tenth grade) to attend school free of charge. The Amendment to the Compulsory Education Law-1949 required that implementation of the new amendment be fully achieved by 1992 the law was frozen.

The situation in ECCD, can be all summarized under the three coming frames;

Deprivation: The lack of material conditions and services generally held to be essential to the development of children’s full potential.

Exclusion: the result of unjust processes through which children’s dignity, voice, and rights are denied, or their existence as a whole person threatened.

Vulnerability: an inability of society to cope with existing or probable threats to children in their environment.

To deal with these aspects and to promote Social Inclusion and Respect for Diversity in ECCD and to advocate for policy changes toward the Palestinian ECCD, we,

a group of Palestinian organization working in ECCD field, organized ourselves in 1992, after years of working separately on the issues, and created the early childhood committee. The committee started working on addressing different aspects using various strategies, The Rational for these efforts was:

 Children have recognized national and international rights, the Palestinian children's rights are often violated.

 Arab children have the right like all other children to be treated equally by all levels of decision makers on the local and national level in order to develop ECCD in the Arab community.

 We believe that the child is an individual with his/her own characteristics and a full member of its family and society and have rights. Our founding vision is to work for the rights of children according to the UN Convention of the Rights of Children (CRC), 1989.

 There is a need to create a coalition of different role players to advocate for children’s rights.

 It is important that the decision-making bodies locally, nationally and internationally remain updated on the situation of children in our society.

 We believe that advocating for children rights could improve the services provided for children and enhance the quality of their life.

 We believe that advocating for Arab children’s rights is essential for reaching equality and to enhance democracy.

We used different strategies to address the different aims we were trying to achiev:

1. We worked to raise awareness in our community to the important of ECCD and we encourage our local councils to take responsibility for ECCD in the community.

Here we used the several strategies; discussions in the Media, publishing articles on the issue in the Newspaper, Events open to the public, study days, seminars, training workshop with different groups etc. our aims were;

• Raising social awareness to the importance of early childhood

• Raising the level of the local authorities' involvement in the early childhood context, especially in establishing Kindergartens for age 3-5.

There has been a remarkable progress in this field. The concern for children and childhood in general, and the awareness of the importance of early childhood in particular have increased.

Following the increased interest in developing early childhood specializations, we, at Musharakah, provided six Master female students with scholarships to develop leaderships in early childhood. Nowadays, we are developing a similar project for another 15 students. Musharakah has also graduated 19 professional supervisors who passed a pioneer and formally recognized training course in the Arab society in Israel.

One of the important challenges we still dealing with is appreciating our own knowledge and the rich cultural heritage and critically consume it or change it. After years of colonization and occupation and discrimination most individuals in our community are acting in the framework of the psychology of the oppressed, they internalized their inferiority and tend to refuse their own culture and are open to adapt all "what comes from the west" or glorify the past and "refuse all what comes from the west" they prefer to Freeze in that past instead of contributing to the generating of knowledge.

In Musharakh we are trying to take the lead in the third direction: build on our accumulated experiences and Heritage as well as newly learned knowledge and adopt methods which integrate authenticity with innovation and generate new resources for children, parents and Kindergarten teachers, which promote Social Inclusion and reflect respect for diversity.

The challenge here is to disseminate our vision and our educational approaches.

• Recognizing the child’s internal life that appears and prospers under certain conditions (valuing the individual’s various capacities).

• Recognizing the child’s internal motivation which leads him to initiate activities and direct them, as very crucial for developing his different personality aspects.

• Appreciating the individual differences between children.

• Raising the child on self-discipline, for guaranteeing his personal freedom and responsible behavior in a socio-cultural context.

• Raising the child should be done according to the child’s own capacities.

• Appreciating and respecting the parents and large family’s role in enriching the child’s surrounding.

Despite this improvement, our children still suffer a serious discrimination regarding the services and opportunities offered to them. Caregivers are still in need for supportive resources in Arabic, and parents still encounter serious challenges.

2. Intensive work in Advocacy in front the government to increase the educational services to our children

Here we used several strategies including Lobby in Parliament, petition to supreme court and other means of campaigning include national and International advocacy efforts. We aimed at:

 Advocating in front of the government to promote inclusion and social integration :

• Implement the compulsory education law from 3 years old in the Arab society.

• Lobbying on the governmental level to change the criteria for implementing the free compulsory education.

• Lobbying to increase the early childhood courses in the formal training institutions.

• Lobbying to obtain recognition of the existent training institutions.

Long years of Advocacy led to the government decision of applying the law of free compulsory education gradually, within 10 years beginning from 1999.

At that time, the minister of education suggested applying the law according to “national priorities”, thus excluding the majority of Arab children. Following the application list which included 136 settlements in the occupied territories, we organized another campaign against that discriminating decision. The public institutions, including Shatil’s early childhood committee and the follow-up committee on the Arab education, approached the high court regarding this issue. They required a just application of the law and suggested the socio-economic scale as an appropriate and fair scaling. These insisting public committees were welcomed by the new minister of education who adopted our attitudes and suggestions and transformed the “national priorities” into measures determined according to the socio-economic scaling published by the central surveys bureau (previously presented in this paper). 41 Arab villages and towns were included in the list, these were the lowest on the socio-economic scale. For the first time we were able to promote social inclusions for Arab citizen too.

Despite our achievements concerning the 1999 free compulsory education and our successful impact on the ministry of education, the application of this law still suffers budget deduction and the ministry’s ignorance. According to the 2003 general survey, there was an increase in the number of children attending KGs (3-4 years old) in the areas where the law has been applied.

Following the law application, the children number was doubled, especially after applying the law in the two lowest levels of the socio-economic scale.

If we look at the education percentage, which is the percentage of the children number in the educational framework for 1000 child in each age category, we conclude that the gap between the Arab and the Jewish education percentage is huge, reaching 50%: the Arab education 24.7%, while the Jewish 47.3%. The gap becomes smaller once the children are younger:

This demonstrate the positive impact the law has on the numbers of children in KGs.. We also have invested maximum efforts to lobby on the ministry of education to increase the training courses in teachers' formal institutions to qualify the caregivers working in the field. Though much was achieved, there is still a need to give more weight to this issue in order to:

• Implement the law in all areas, especially in the Negev

• Training for the unqualified caregivers

• To enhance the quality of the training adopted in the different official training organizations.

Child’s cultural identity and respect for Diversity

In respect for the child’s cultural identity, the Committee on the Rights of the Child has commented that Article 29(1) emphasizes the child’s “individual and subjective right to a specific quality of education” and where “the curriculum must be of direct relevance to the child’s social, cultural, environmental, and economic context . . “.

The official Arab education system in Israel, however, has been widely criticized by Palestinian Arabs as failing to adequately consider the Palestinian identity of Arabs in Israel and reflect respect for diversity in the society. The overarching aims of education remain based on the transmission of Jewish values and culture, and Zionist thought. This type of education Is inappropriate for Jewish or Palestinian Arab children, who suppose to respect diversity adapt democratic humanistic values which promote and protect minorities rights in the sense which is reflected in the CRC. Article 29(1) of the Convention on the Rights of the Child focuses on the aims of children's education:

(a) The development of the child's personality, talents and mental and physical abilities to their fullest potential;

(b) The development of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and for the principles enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations;

(c) The development of respect for the child's parents, his or her own cultural identity, language and values, for the national values of the country in which the child is living, the country from which he or she may originate, and for civilizations different from his or her own;

(d) The preparation of the child for responsible life in a free society, in the spirit of understanding, peace, tolerance, equality of the sexes, and friendship among all peoples, ethnic national and religious groups and persons of indigenous origin; and

(e) The development of respect for the natural environment.

The concept of “rights” contains many educational dimensions that are necessary for the existence of an educational framework at this period in time and for all children especially minority children such as Arab Palestinian Children or children with special need who are the most vulnerable and the most neglected by the state.

Therefore we will continue with our advocacy effort for Arab children's rights and to bring the messages to the forefront of the government and the different Ministries, municipalities and village councilors, as well as internationally.

Lessons learned

• Despite the witnessed progress in the domain of early childhood, the different organizations realized that the efforts they invested have not been enough to fill the still existent gaps. The attempt to influence the government policies toward the Arab society and Arab children's right could only achieved via networking.

• The work have to be run simultaneously on the community level raise the social awareness regarding the importance of early childhood and on the governmental level.

Networking and not Networks

The new networks that were developing created a lot of power struggle between the people. The hierarchical structure of the networks created a space for envy, power struggle, conflicted and strange intersects etc. With the time to continue in these networks need a lot of energies, egesosting after each meeting one would ask him/herself why I need it. Often the cause is forgotten and instead of agent of change the structure become an obstacle in front of any change. The Network frame/s were a space which recreate the hierarchal structures in the community and activate all factors combine with the psychology of oppression

We needed liberating strategies.

• Strategies that are based on collective processes

• Strategies that respect Diversity and enable all to be involve in decision making

• Strategies that enable us to see our self as agent and not only as victims,

• Strategies that enable us to take responsibilities and incite not only react to other initiatives.

• Strategies that enable each partner to see the abilities and disabilities of his own organization.

• Strategies that enable us to celebrate the abilities of others and see them as complementative and not as compitentative to each other.

• Strategies that contribute to the development of a sustainable structure (since it not concentrating the power by one person rather all are sharing each other power)

• Strategies that empower the participant and create new positive energies

Therefore we decided to use Networking and not to develop Networks

Networking as a strategy is built upon the awareness that:

• Every one can do something no one can do everything.

• That every one have the right to participate on all levels

• Use the power with the others and not over the others

• Networking build nonhierarchical structure

• Networking is effective in bringing about change especially in discriminatory environment

• Creating the culture of Networking is a liberating culture

We did not finish we just began