The scandal that we reported last week, about a study of the
Ministry of Education that showed that chareidi schools
received two or three times the government support that
regular schools received, is the result of a mistake that
should never have happened. The first rule that beginning
students of statistics learn is to be sure that all variables
that are to be compared are measuring the same thing. How can
you say one thing is more or less than another if they
measure two different amounts? If the budget for chareidi
schools includes the staff payrolls, you cannot compare it to
the budget of state schools that does not include the
payroll.
This would seem so elementary a point that it should not have
to be made. And moreover, if a report was produced with such
an error, it should be hurriedly acknowledged, apologized
for, and withdrawn as quickly as possible. None of this
happened.
The results of the study should have raised alarm bells. It
is simply not reasonable that a state educational system
should have such great disparities, that one system could get
two to three times as much money as another. Anyone at all
familiar with the respective systems — as the officials
from the Education Ministry presumably are — should
have raised suspicions and investigated before
publication.
Nothing was done before publication, and even when the
mistake was pointed out by MK Rabbi Moshe Gafni, it took
almost three full months until he received a written
acknowledgement of the mistake, and even then the original
study was not withdrawn. It remains available on the Israeli
government's website, ready to fool any unsuspecting reader
or to supply fodder for new attacks on the chareidi community
for sucking the financial blood of the government —
even after the community has suffered disproportional cuts
over the past two years of economic retrenchment.
Another case, not directly related, is that of the "Team
Funds." A full report appears in this issue, but in short
this is a substantial amount of money that was not
transferred to Torah institutions through no fault of their
own, but only because the computer systems did not work.
There was no apparent policy decision, but nonetheless the
bureaucrats worked steadily for five years to avoid
disbursing the money. There is no other way to describe what
they did. They hired accounting firm after accounting firm to
check the figures, and required report after report. The
heads of the institutions had to submit at least four reports
of their students and had to sign at least three
declarations. And all this took over four years.
It was only about a year ago that the bureaucrats finally
finished "verifying" the data, that is, four years after the
fact. But they were still not ready to turn over the state's
money. It was only through a political "deal" with Rabbi
Gafni, in which the money was paid out of budgetary
surpluses, that the money was finally received, money that
was duly approved five years ago.
In both these cases, and in many others, the chareidi
community is not given its due. That is an understatement. In
both these cases, the exchange of ideas is below the level of
civilized discourse. The behavior of the Finance Ministry in
the case of the Team Funds was clearly an attempt to delay as
long as possible any disbursement of funds, though the terms
in which it was couched were those of normal bureaucratic
verification and certification. That is, they pretended to be
concerned about verification, but really they just wanted to
avoid paying chareidim any money. Nothing else can explain
the whole five year story.
Similarly, in the case of the Education Ministry report and
the analysis by the Central Bureau of Statistics, the obvious
goal was chareidi bashing. The mistake made is beyond what is
reasonable for a professional statistician to make.
From time to time voices are raised saying that the chareidim
do not reach out enough to dialog with the secular community.
Neither of these cases was even mentioned outside of the
chareidi press. These cases show quite clearly the level of
dialogue that the secular community is willing to sustain
with the chareidi community. We did nothing to deserve, or
even to stimulate these indignities. The onus is on them to
stop bashing us, and to start talking to us.
