Middle School

In 2018, the Trump Foundation expanded its work from high school to middle school. The roadmap we developed at the time described middle school as the weak link in the educational continuum. Students move from the small, familiar setting of elementary school to a large, crowded school, and complete middle school far from where the high-school excellence tracks begin, with no measure to show them where they need to get to.

The roadmap set out three integrated stages: strengthening the foundations, developing skills and beginning to specialize. It explicitly assumed that the existing curricula, the array of exams and the leaders of education in the field provide a sufficient knowledge base on which to build a broad base of excellence.

To this end, we chose PISA’s conceptual framework as the compass for our work in middle school. In the first stage, we turned to the professional field to build capacity from the ground up: hundreds of learning tasks, thousands of trained teachers and some 250 excellence classes taught in line with international standards.

In 2022, the Ministry of Education announced its intention to lead the initiative and declared that it would adapt the middle school mathematics curriculum. Implementation stalled in the shadow of the war, however, and the Ministry is now moving it forward again. The new curriculum, aligned with PISA’s conceptual framework, has now been published, and the first implementation steps have begun.

Amid these development efforts and implementation challenges, Israeli middle school has gone through a major upheaval. The results of all the middle-school assessments (PISA, TIMSS and the national Tenufa assessments) show that learning has eroded sharply in recent years. In mathematics, about half of the students do not reach the baseline level, and the share of top performers has been cut by about half.

In high school, by contrast, excellence indicators have returned to growth. The number of students eligible for High-Tech Matriculation has passed 15,000, and the number eligible in mathematics at the highest (five-unit) level has exceeded 22,000. This growth is encouraging and promising, but it also comes after a difficult period of war, lockdowns, accommodations and reduced requirements.

In the International Advisory Council discussion, we want to address the deeper questions.

Looking back, was the Foundation wrong to expand its work to middle school? Was choosing international standards the right step? And were we wrong to assume that the existing knowledge base and array of exams were a foundation we could build on?

Looking ahead, should we abandon middle school and move the center of gravity of our work back to high school? Or, on the contrary, should we deepen the Foundation’s work in middle school to strengthen the knowledge base, raise the bar and reinforce learning discipline?