Peter Gray came to my youngest daughter’s school last night to talk about why I should just relax and let my daughter play her way through her adolescence.

About fifteen months ago, Misgav, now 15, asked to transfer to the Sudbury School in Jerusalem. The school, located a short walk from our home, operates on the model of the Sudbury Valley School in Massachusetts. That means, in short, that the kids run the school. There are no course requirements, the kids only study if and what they want to. Staff exists to facilitate what the kids want, not determine what they should learn. Play is considered no less, perhaps more valuable, than formal classes. The school enrolls children from the ages of 4 through 18 and any activity or lesson is likely to include children of a wide variety of ages.

Gray became acquainted with Sudbury when, more than 30 years ago, he decided to send his son Scott there. Scott is now a staff member at the original Sudbury school and also spoke to us last night. A psychologist at Boston College, Peter conducted research about the school and became one of its major advocates, as can be seen on his blog.

Misgav, who just did not fit into regular school frameworks, is flourishing at her new school. Ilana and I are pleased to see how she is developing responsibility and interests of her own, rather than ones imposed on her from outside. But it does take a lot of patience on our part. It’s not easy to get used to the fact that Misgav is not studying normal high school subjects in the formal way that her parents and siblings studied them in other schools.

I am, however, skeptical of Gray’s claim—seconded by the school staff here in Jerusalem and in other like schools—that this type of school is the best kind of school for all children. I have three other children and I have seen two of them respond well to the frameworks imposed by traditional schools and to the academic expectations that these schools have made of them. True, they’ve also struggled with and rebelled against these requirements at times, and have suffered under a lot of incompetent teachers. But the specific problems of the Israeli school system does not mean that traditional education as a concept is wrong.

Fortunately, one of South Jerusalem’s great amenities is its diversity—among them, its diversity of schools. Each of our children has attended a different one—indeed, each one seems to have needed something different from a school. And each is succeeding his her or his own way. The right way for Misgav to learn is to play her way through high school—and we’re delighted that there’s a place close by where she can do that.

Reading Schramm’s foreshortened biography made me think about Israeli education. He was born in Jerusalem, went to school here, got his BA and MA from Hebrew U. Given the condition of Israeli schools today, will they produce more Schramms?

As reported last week, Israel’s underfunded school system gets terrible marks from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development:

The number of students per-class in Israel is one of the highest in the world, with an average of 33 students in every junior-high calls room, as opposed to about 24 in other Western countries. Grade-school student fair only marginally better – 27 pupils per-class room, as opposed to 22 in other OECD countries… the student-teacher ration in Israel is one of the highest in the world, with 17 students per teacher.

As a result, Israeli students are slipping [in] the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) rankings: In the last two PISA tests, assessing students in reading, math and sciences, Israel ranked 39 and 40 out of 57 nations. Israeli students in the top 5% still trail far behind their OECD counterparts.

Perhaps a Schramm can still surface – the same article notes that Israel “has the highest standard deviation within the OECD’s average results.” My reading: Israeli parents are still pouring in money to make up for bad schools. A Schramm born to middle-class parents in a well-off Tel Aviv suburb would still succeed. The same natural talent in a kid from the Katamonim slums in Jerusalem, or from a poor Negev town, would never get the chance to flower. Meanwhile the Treasury thinks that the way to build the country’s economy is to continue cutting income taxes, a bit more each year.

Schramm went to Princeton to get his PhD, came back here for a few years, then got a position at Microsoft Research in Redmond. I’m no Microsoft fan, but the for-profit corporation deserves credit for investing in basic research. By contrast, the Israeli Treasury continues to whittle away at the quality of universities, public institutions that should be devoted to investing in the country’s long-term future. How many brilliant Israelis have gone overseas to get the chance to study with the masters, or to do research on the level they want? How many would stay here if higher education were funded as it should be – as the source of Israel’s only natural resource? And perhaps if they stayed here, more scholars would come here instead of Princeton and Harvard to study under them. You don’t need to have Schramm’s genius with numbers to see that our educational policy doesn’t add up.

Motti works out with me at the gym at the Jerusalem Pool. A cab driver by profession, he’s a bit younger than me and shares my exercise addiction; like me he has a teenage son who also works out at the gym. We work hard to stay healthy, and we both want our kids to succeed at school. What’s the connection?

Last night we managed to pry my niece away from her Birthright trip for a short visit with the family, and I called on Motti to drive us back to the hotel outside Jerusalem where her group is staying. It being the end of the school year, on the way back to the city, we chatted about our sons and their schoolwork.

“He doesn’t want to study,” Motti said half-mournfully, half-derisively about his tenth-grader. His son attends a secular public high school in the Katamonim neighborhood, a school that serves a large section of South Jerusalem that includes disadvantaged and poor neighborhoods as well as lower middle class areas.

I told him about my son’s learning disabilities, how he had not wanted to learn for many years, and how gratifying it is to see him now, learning, studying, and getting in the 90s on his high school graduation exams.

“How did that happen?” Motti asked.

“It needed a lot of patience,” I said. “But it’s also thanks to the fact that we found a high school called Dror where there were teachers who understood his issues and knew how to reach him, help him learn and succeed, and give him confidence. Beyond that, it’s also thanks to the fact that we’ve shelled out huge sums of money for private lessons given by teachers trained to teach kids with learning disabilities.”

“Private lessons?” Motti asked.

“I’ve got the figures here in my Palm Pilot. This year we spent NIS 15,000 [~ $4,500] on private lessons for my son.”

“Fifteen thousand! How can you manage that?!”

“And that’s in addition to the NIS 9,000 [~$2,700] we pay in tuition to his high school,” I noted.

“You pay tuition?” Motti is astounded. “Public schools aren’t supposed to charge tuition.”

“Of course not,” I answer. “But the basic curriculum that the government pays for is bare bones. It’s just not enough. So we pay to enable the school to offer more hours of instruction, have smaller classes, and more programs.”

From Motti’s brief description, it sounds like his son may have some of the same learning issues my son does. But with his cab driver’s income, he doesn’t have the money to even think about sending his kid to a school where parents pay for extra programming, much less to spend thousands of shekels on private lessons. The consequence: my son is succeeding, Motti’s may not. Because he’ll earn his high school diploma, my son will have a large range of options for further and higher education open to him when he completes his military service. Motti’s son, if he doesn’t get the help he needs to get his diploma, will be restricted to a much smaller range of vocational programs and professions.

Were either of our sons to get injured lifting weights, or doing anything else, they’d both enjoy equal medical coverage. Israel has universal public health care; we belong to different plans, but the differences are small. The costs are also relatively modest. That’s how health insurance works—by distributing risk over a large population, every citizen can pay a reasonable amount and the system can pay for the costs of catastrophic care. A privatize system would be unfair and would perpetuate existing social inequities.

Yet Israel doesn’t have universal education insurance. Motti’s son and my son don’t get equal educational services and catastrophic costs. Learning disabilities are the educational equivalent of, say, chronic asthma or kidney malfunction, and require large sums for treatment. When it comes to school, if you’ve got the money you can afford the treatment for your kids, and if you don’t have money, your kids stay sick.

Here’s an idea—why don’t we spread those costs over the entire population, so that no family will incur catastrophic costs when they discover that their kid needs special tutoring? We can call it “universal education insurance.”

If we had universal education insurance, Motti’s son would get the same opportunities my son will get. Children would realize their full potential, social inequities would be shattered rather than perpetuated, and ethnic barriers would fall away. Isn’t that worth—can I say it straight out—higher taxes?

Sometimes when I read Tom Friedman, I’m so taken by his bubbly optimism, I want to drink whatever he’s been sipping. Especially when he’s bubbling about Israel, as in “People vs. Dinosaurs” . Says Tom: In contrast to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who thinks that Israel is in its last days, zillionnaire investor Warren Buffett is putting lots of money on Israel’s rosy future. And Tom is betting with Buffet.

In principle, I’d agree. But for Buffet to hit the jackpot, Israel’s government will have to reject Friedmanism – all of Milton Friedmanism, and some of Tom Friedmanism.

Tom explains that Israel’s economy is driven by high-tech and innovation:

From outside, Israel looks as if it’s in turmoil, largely because the entire political leadership seems to be under investigation. But Israel is a weak state with a strong civil society. The economy is exploding from the bottom up. Israel’s currency, the shekel, has appreciated nearly 30 percent against the dollar since the start of 2007.

The reason? Israel is a country that is hard-wired to compete in a flat world. It has a population drawn from 100 different countries, speaking 100 different languages, with a business culture that strongly encourages individual imagination and adaptation and where being a nonconformist is the norm.

As for occasional missile showers disrupting the economy, Tom quotes Israeli businessman Eitan Wertheimer, who quotes Buffet as saying, “‘I’m not interested in the next quarter. I’m interested in the next 20 years.”

This is sensible. But since I haven’t been sharing Tom’s bottle, I’ll point out some reasons to hedge the bets.

First, as Haim notes in his last post , Israelis are losing confidence in their political institutions. In fact, if the prime minister or the Knesset were stocks, their price would be near zero. Among the underlying causes for the devaluation of politics is that this is a small country, and one influenced by the culture of a hegemonic power – today, America. Since the 80s, the American market attitude of “greed is good” has replaced the old public-service ethic, and a small country’s limited resource of bright talented people has gone to business rather than politics. Those who do go into politics apparently expect to live like businesspeople – and some businesspeople are happy to make it possible. (See under: Olmert, investigations .) But when there’s lack of confidence in the political system, investors will eventually get wary of instability. Ignoring this risk, Tom is being entirely too sanguine.

Besides that, businessman Buffet is unusual these days in taking a 20-year view of investment. The Israeli government is taking the opposite approach. Committed to free-market fundamentalism, it is constantly trying to shrink the state’s role – and thereby ignoring the state’s duty to make long-term investments. As Tom’s riff makes clear, Israel’s greatest resource is brainpower. But that resource must be developed through education. Instead, the government continues to let the education system crumble. Meanwhile, Finance Minister Roni Bar-On has just announced his plan for new tax cuts. The government is flush, he’s saying, it can give out money. This is the equivalent of an oil company handing out dividends while its reserves run down and its pumps need repair. If the government is flush, why doesn’t it cut class sizes, or boost pay to attract people to teach, or expand school libraries, or provide tutors to kids who might make it to university with some help, or cut university tuition to 0 shekels per year, with generous scholarships for living expenses to students from poor homes? Education is a job for Big Government, long may it live.

Right now, Israeli high-tech is powered by investments made in education many years ago. Some of those investments were made by Israeli parents who got tutors for their kids. A large piece of the investment was made by a different government – the evidence is the Russian accent of many software engineers. But that source of educated personpower has run out.

Mr. Bar-On: Banish Milton Friedman and Ronald Reagan (the world champ at cutting school budgets) from your mind. Look at how investments will pay in 20 years, and put cash into schools and universities.

As for Tom Friedmanism: Our bubbly columnist loves high-tech and the globalized economy. But as I’ve written before , the high-tech and financial economy has boosted only as small portion of Israel, in what I call the Republic of Tel Aviv. The Other Israel has seen its industries destroyed by global competition. And it’s also watching as its culture and identity comes under steady assault from the globalization of culture and consumption. These are the precursors of nationalist and religious radicalization, and of social conflict. Which isn’t good for business, Tom.

(Neither is that strong shekel you rave about. It’s actually horrible for exports, including high-tech. And it’s killing NGOs that depend on dollar donations – NGOs that have been taking up the slack for government neglect of education and social needs.)

Even with the best education, not everyone is going to become a software engineer. For Israel to remain healthy, its government will have to help low-end industries that can provide jobs and self-respect to the other Israelis. It will have to support local culture. It might need to restrict the extent to which global chains can take over the main streets of our towns, eliminating local identity. It will have to provide some balance to globalization. Along with banishing Milton, it will have to be cautious about Tom Friedman. Otherwise Buffet will lose his bet, and since he’s betting on my country, I’d like to see him win.

In elementary school, Niot had trouble sitting still in class. He didn’t seem to “get” many of the lessons. Frustrated and bored, he developed anti-social behaviors, including fierce outbursts of anger and sometimes violence. The teachers, counselors, and administrators at his school did their best, but were largely at a loss for how to handle him. Ilana and I were as well.

After seeking outside advice, we had Niot tested for learning disabilities. The tests showed what we’d sensed all along. The boy was not stupid or dim-minded. He was bright, but his mind didn’t work the way the standard curriculum and teaching procedures expected them to work.

By the time we had learned all this, Niot was already alienated and frustrated from school. We began to send him to tutors specially trained to teach children with learning disabilities (at our own expense, see my previous post “What Education Costs Us”), but having been totally turned off to school and being convinced by the negative reactions he’d been getting that he was incapable, he made little progress.

When it came time for him to enter junior high school, we were fortunate to find a place where the teaching staff was well-acquainted with how to teach such children, and who were sure that Niot could succeed.

It was a long progress, with twists and turns, steps forward and steps back. But, slowly, as Niot saw that he could learn, he gained confidence in himself and motivation to study. The school system granted him a set of special considerations-extra time, the option of taking oral exams-removing obstacles that created the kind of pressure that led to his previous frustration. His behavior improved and his grades rose.

Today he’s in eleventh grade and no one-teachers, parents, and most importantly, Niot, doubts that he will successfully complete the entire battery of national high school graduation exams and even excel at them, as his 97 mark yesterday shows.

Here’s a textbook case of how to turn failure into success. It shows how much children-indeed, adults as well-can change in an environment where the incentives are positive rather than negative. It shows how important patience and perseverance are with problem children. It shows that behaviors, self-perceptions, and views of the world are fluid, not written in stone. Too many kids like Niot never get the help they need. If they did, think how much better off we’d all be.

Or Kashti writes there:

The study found that in the 2004-05 academic year, the proportion of students who earned a bagrut (matriculation) certificate was 25.5 percentage points higher in the two highest socioeconomic deciles than in the two lowest deciles. That is almost identical to the gap recorded in 1992-93 – 25.3 percentage points

There are a lot of reasons for the failure of the People of the Book to produce a decent school system here—low teacher salaries, bloated bureaucracy, party politics—but the Bank of Israel points out a major reason why the gap persists, as Kashti tells us:

The gap is due in large part to the fact that wealthier families can and do spend considerable sums of money on private education to supplement what their children receive from the public school system, the report said. “Today, every 10 percent increase in family income raises the percentage of [students who] matriculate by an average of some 0.4 percentage points.…”

That strikes close to home. In 2007, my middle-class family spent a full 12 percent of its combined income on education—about 40 percent of that on high school tuition and 60 percent on private tutoring. That’s 60 percent above our mortgage payments, more than our entire grocery bill for the year. It was the single largest item in our budget. Excuse me, the second largest—the largest outlay went to taxes, in exchange for which the government, by law, is supposed to provide us with free education through twelfth grade.

Actually, our educational outlays have declined over the last few years, as the two oldest children completed high school. Imagine what I was paying when I had four children in the system.

By law, high schools aren’t supposed to charge tuition, but parents pay gladly because without these extra sums the schools would be able to offer only the bare-bones program that the state pays for. This under-the-table system has two negative consequences. First, kids grow up observing close up that the way things get done in this country is by the exchange of cash under the table (see yesterday’s conviction of a former cabinet minister on bribery charges, just the latest in a long string of such scandals). Second, since the payments are technically illegal, the schools and paying parents have no means of enforcing them. So there are lots of freeloaders who get the benefits and don’t pay.

Why do I need to spend so much on private tutors for my kids? My eleventh-grade son and ninth-grade daughter are bright and talented, but they have learning disabilities. We’ve discovered over the years that most Israeli schools and educators have no real knowledge of how to teach such kids. There is a lot of good will but little training. And the budgets available for providing such kids with the small groups and individual attention they need are miniscule.

With some effort, we found schools with teaching staffs aware of and able to get the best out of these two children. But even though these schools provide a lot of help, we still have to supplement their efforts with private instruction. What the schools offer is simply not sufficient.

The money is well-spent. My eleventh-grade son is on his way to completing his high school graduation exams successfully. He’s motivated, happy, and a hard worker.

But at the end of each month, when I write out the checks to his four private teachers, I am painfully aware of how lucky my kids are. A short walk away from our house are public housing projects where parents struggle to feed their kids. They can’t possibly afford the tuition and private tutoring costs we incur. And in those housing projects, in Jerusalem, in other cities, in the development towns, live thousands of kids with learning disabilities whose lives are going to waste.

These kids won’t earn a high school graduation certificate; as a result they won’t go to college; as a result of that, they will work at low-paying jobs; as a result of that the education gap fifteen years from now will be as large as it is today.

I’ve been invited to participate next week in a discussion about a vision for Israel’s educational future. I attended another such discussion a couple weeks ago. The fact is that we have vision aplenty. What no one seems to know is how to turn visions into reality. The first order of the day must be how to close the education gap between the rich and the poor.