Appointing Experienced Experts To Be Consultants

Over the past four years, we have been gradually collaborating with municipalities across Israel that prioritize the advancement of mathematics and science studies in high school. We chose to work with cities, because in Israel they are directly responsible for high schools, hiring their personnel and allocating their budget. We have joined their effort to increase the number of five-unit students by harnessing centers of expertise that specialize in clinical teaching and developing local competencies through communities of practice and instructional coaching. To date, we have engaged with 14 municipalities, including highly populated and medium sized cities, central and remote, Jewish and Arab.

Each of these relationships requires a significant investment of time and human resources on the part of both the foundation and the municipality, involving hands-on collection and analysis of data, designing the program and monitoring systems, enlisting professional advice and support, and more. Each municipal partner has their own unique needs, challenges, organizational culture and patterns of work, and therefore require different expertise to respond to individual needs as they emerge. The end goal for this endeavor is that after three years of joint work, the municipality will continue it independently.

Due to the enthusiasm aroused by the emerging success of the national program, there is now a growing interest among municipalities to collaborate with us to launch mathematics and science excellence programs. It is our goal to increase the scope of partnerships to 25 cities within the next year. In order to scale up without compromising high levels of engagement, we are proposing the following scheme: we will select and train four expert freelance consultants who will each assist four cities. They will bring rich experience of work within local authorities, particularly Arab and social periphery towns – a vital experience that we are lacking in our team. They will interact with our partners in municipalities to help mine relevant data, identify needs and build a comprehensive program.

We are considering working with Tawfik Karman, who for years worked as an external auditor in Arab cities for the Interior Ministry, and assisted us in recent months; Bahaa Zoabi, of Al-Quasemi College, who proved to be an effective middleman in working with Arab nonprofits and municipalities; Leah Dolev, former head of mathematics at the ORT school network and Yohanan Doron, former head of education department in the town of Netivot. Each of them will devote 30 hours per month to individual meetings with municipality staff, site visits and reporting to the foundation. They will work on an experimental basis for one year and then we will draw conclusions and recommend next steps.

* The text presented above shows the grant as approved by the Foundation Board / Grant 270