UTJ threatens Knesset boycott amid Education funding standoff

The Ashkenazic-Haredi party United Torah Judaism announced to Coalition whip MK Ofir Katz (Likud) that they will boycott the Knesset plenum until their “education issues are resolved,” a spokesperson for one of the party’s MKs confirmed on Wednesday.

The coalition intends to introduce a number of bills on Thursday for a vote in a plenum session scheduled for Monday – a UTJ boycott will make it harder to ensure that the bills pass.

The main bill is an amendment to the 2024 budget bill, which proposes to increase state spending for 2024 by NIS 3.4 billion in order to fund evacuees from the North and South until the end of the calendar year.

According to Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, the change will not increase the state’s budget deficit, since it will be offset by higher-than-expected national income from taxes.

Education issues?

The UTJ spokesperson did not specify which “education issues” he was referring to, nor what would constitute their “resolution.”

However, the central issue is likely related to the teachers in the two major semi-private haredi school systems, Hinuch Atzmai, which is associated with the Lithuanian faction within UTJ, and Bnei Yosef, associated with Shas.

The haredi parties have demanded that the two education systems be included in a salary agreement called “Ofek Hadash” (Hebrew for “New Horizons”) that would significantly increase their teachers’ salaries.

Ofek Hadash, which began in the public school system in 2008, determined teachers’ salaries based on their level of academic and professional training, introduced non-frontal teaching, such as paid one-on-one lessons and set standards for schools’ infrastructure and teaching environments.

Ofek Hadash also requires that schools teach the full core curriculum by trained teachers based on education ministry standards; present a yearly plan for study based on clearly defined standards; provide the ministry with information regarding all of its staff and their professional background; “open their gates to close ministry oversight”; and take standardized national and international tests to gage progress.

Despite Education Minister Yoav Kisch’s attempts to pass new regulations in order to implement the haredi systems’ entry into Ofek Hadash, the move has been held up due to legal concerns from officials in both the finance and justice ministries. The main concern was about a clause in the regulations instituting a four-year interim period, in which the two systems would receive the Ofek Hadash benefits while training teachers to meet its demands.

Finance and Justice Ministry officials argued that this essentially enabled the haredi systems to receive the Ofek Hadash benefits without meeting the full core curriculum standard for the next four years; rather than enable this, the schools should only be allowed to enter the program after they have met the standards.

For this and other reasons, the finance ministry’s legal advisor said that the regulations were not “legally viable,” and Kisch has yet to sign them.