Map Of The Rates Of Students Learning At Excellence Tracks

The foundation’s roadmap for middle schools sets the goal for Israel reaching the top 15 excelling countries in mathematics, as measured by the PISA research. One significant milestone in advancing towards this goal is to expand the circle of excellence in middle schools. Specifically, we aim to help raise the rate of students in excellence classes, who learn applied mathematics at high level. These excellence classes offer a supplemental curriculum that deepens and accelerates the mathematical knowledge, and the applications of mathematics in contexts of science and technology.

Excellence classes in middle schools are operated independently by various organizations, including government, municipalities and non-profits. They do not share standards, nor collaborate with each other. Approximately 15% of the students attend these classes, constituting one class in each grade level on average. Our target is to expand this rate to 40%, so that each able and motivated student will have the opportunity to learn at these levels. This goal requires adding a second, and sometimes a third excellence class in every middle school.

Measuring the progress towards achieving this goal would be vital. Therefore, we approached Social Finance Israel (SFI), a not-for-profit organization, which has a strong analytics capacity. They developed this capacity while preparing Social Impact Bonds that require expertise in working with big data. SFI are proposing a process of two phases. The first phase will seek to identify the different types of excellence classes. Since there are a number of central and regional operators of such classes, as well as local and school-based initiatives, it will be important to set a basic typology.

Therefore, SFI will collect sample data from schools, using a digital tool, until it captures the full range of diversity. Then they will conduct interviews with the different operators, in order to learn the components of each program. At the end of the first phase, SFI will define shared criteria in order to determine which programs meet the standards of an excellence class. It is expected that several clusters of such classes will emerge from this analysis.

In the second phase, this typology will be used in order to collect data at scale and present it in a database and on a geographic map. The intention is to measure the rate of students in each municipality and even in each school, that learn in at least one type of excellence class, and to keep collecting data annually in order to be able to see the progress. This kind of continuous collection at large scale will require close collaboration with the Ministry of Education, which will participate in this project from its outset.