ISRAEL: School’s out...still

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Go to mall. Make calls on cellphone. Snack. Sleep. Repeat.

American parents know well this bored-teen routine during holidays and vacations. But consider the especially frazzled state of Israeli parents these days.

High school teachers in Israel have been on strike since October, sending 400,000 squirrely teenagers into the streets and malls for two months. But that’s not the half of it. The strike hit soon after summer vacation and the Jewish High Holidays, meaning students have been at home for all but a few weeks since spring. Making things worse, a separate, rolling strike and the Passover holiday in April kept classes shut for much of the late spring.

Alternating between fiesta and siesta, idle teens are costing their parents an estimated $250 more each month each between partying, snacking and yakking, according to one estimate.

The nine-week strike is over salaries and school reforms. Compared to Europe and the United States, teacher pay in Israel is low — about $15,000 a year for someone with 15 years on the job. Ben Caspit, an Israeli columnist, calculates that monthly pay for a beginning teacher would buy 250 cups of espresso. ‘That’s a lot of coffee,” he wrote, “but very little money.’

Many Israelis worry that repeated budget trims have begun to carve into the meat of Israel’s public education system. Israeli children ranked poorly in the PIRLS tests that monitor mother-tongue literacy (check out how your kids are doing here), and domestic achievement test results are nothing to smile about either.

Teacher activists have jumped into the Mediterranean to protest the government’s ‘sinking’ of public education, dangled from bridges to demonstrate the ‘hanging’ of the same and followed the prime minister on his recent trip to Annapolis, Md.

Meanwhile, a labor court has ordered teachers back to work after the Hanukkah vacation ends on Wednesday. But 1,000 teachers have pledged to resign if forced to return and 50 high schools have already announced their intention not to comply. Parents are (wearily) staying tuned.

— Batsheva Sobelman in Jerusalem