Through a sense-making lens, this qualitative study explores high school principals' considerations while they perceive and enact additional resources within a national reform implementation. Principals' allocation of resources, especially as part of a national reform, is a complex matter for schools' effectiveness in an era of accountability.…

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationships between the distribution of educational funds allocated by the central government and the educational achievement distribution (EAD) at the primary school level. To this end, the extent of equity in education funding, and the extent of the equality of educational opportunity (EEO) in the…

Purpose: Resource allocation is a key policy instrument that affects the educational achievement distribution (EAD). The literature on methods of allocation is focused mainly on equity issues. The purpose of this paper is to develop a composite funding formula, which adds to the equity-based element (i.e. a needs-based element compensating for…

The educational achievement distribution of Israeli students is characterized by a low level of achievement with a wide achievement gap between high and low achievers compared with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD average. In fact, Israeli student achievement is characterized by the widest gap among the OECD…

The research investigated the way in which school administrations implement resources provided by Israel's "Courage to Change" reform. The uniqueness of this reform stems from the fact that the allocated resources come in the form of "weekly instruction time" rather than finance, and the school management needs to decide how to…

Students from disadvantaged or minority backgrounds are often underrepresented in public educational programmes for the gifted and talented (G&T), a phenomenon that has concerned educators for the last two decades. Ethiopian-Israeli minority students (EIMS) are a good example of this phenomenon, as more than 95% of the vast resources allocated…

Similar to other national contexts, in Israel since the 1980s we have witnessed the emergence of neo-liberal policies in education. However, very little attention has been given to the ways in which they affect the school level and even less attention has been given to the impact of these policy changes on Arab schools in Israel. This article…

Entitlement to education is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights acknowledges education as a fundamental right stating that everyone has the right to education. The question of financing this right mainly focuses on the "governmental" allocation of resources to the…

This paper sets out a new budget allocation formula for schools, designed to achieve a more equitable distribution of educational achievement. In addition to needs-based elements, the suggested composite allocation formula includes an improvement component, whereby schools receive budgetary allocations based on a new incentive measure developed in…

Education is a distinct "sphere of justice" where resources and rewards (educational "goods") are being constantly distributed, and the fairness of their allocation is being evaluated, eliciting a sense of justice or injustice among the evaluators. A sense of (in)justice is a subjective perception of an individual that the…

This investigation documents the impact of the Van Leer Study, a large-scale evaluation study of achievement in the primary schools of Israel. It is intended to increase understanding of the process of evaluation utilization, showing how evaluation findings and other kinds of information can work together, over time and in a variety of ways, to…