Municipal Program in the City of Bat-Yam to Increase the Percentage of Advanced-level Mathematics Matriculation Students to 24%
The city of Bat-Yam is located just south of Tel Aviv, and is home to 130,000 residents. The city has 9 secondary schools, which serve approximately 6,000 students. Over the years, the city has chosen to focus on the needs of its weaker students, aiming to improve their overall academic success and eligibility for matriculation, and has trained its teachers to focus on this goal. As a result, Bat-Yam has successfully raised its matriculation eligibility rates to 81%.
Today, in line with the national drive for excellence in mathematics and science, the municipality has decided to set new objectives, moving from quantity to quality, focusing on the advanced levels, and increasing the percentage of students studying five-unit mathematics to 24% of the high school graduates within three years. Currently, only 12% of the students study five-unit mathematics, and 9.5% of students matriculate at this level at the end of 12th grade.
The city has already tested the waters in this direction, reaching out to a number of organizations and programs that pursue excellence, primarily in middle schools. Among those, the program “Breaking the Glass Ceiling” (which the foundation supported for two years), which operates in 7 high schools in order to encourage female students to choose and study mathematics and the sciences at advanced levels. Other programs in the city operate in smaller scales, in partnership with the Weizmann Institute, the Israel Center for Excellence through Education, and Bar-Ilan University.
Despite this, the city reports it has witnessed a shortage of mathematics teachers capable to teach the 5-unit level. Today there are 56 mathematics teachers, of which only 11 teach 5-unit level for matriculation. Experienced teachers of 4-units have expressed their professional hesitation to teach 5-units as they feel they lack the appropriate training and the necessary pedagogical content knowledge, which they feel they could acquire from further training or coaching from an experienced 5-unit teacher.
In order to tackle this issue and to launch a city-wide program on promoting math excellence, the municipality proposes a program, which includes the following stages:
After three years, the program aims to increase the average rate of advanced-level mathematics matriculation students in all nine high-schools in Bat-Yam to 24%, and to double the number of 5-unit mathematics teachers in the city from 11 to 22.