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Many countries throughout the world provide all children with free education. However, sometimes there are user charges in publically funded schools worldwide. The purpose of this paper is to explore parental participation fees in school expenses in Israel, depicting the current situation and analyzing its implications.

Public documents from Israel were explored, such as guidelines of the CEO of the Ministry of education, laws, court rulings, publications of the Central Bureau of Statistics, reports of State Comptroller and reports of various committees. Document analysis was a three-stage process – condensing, coding and categorizing. The analysis was based on interpretation of the documents collected, attempting to detect explicit and implicit meanings concerning the topic at hand.

Findings show that the Israeli policy in regard to parental payments has three main characteristics: first, high basic payments; second, payments for learning activities; and third, insufficient enforcement.

According to the findings of this study, it would be advisable to re-examine the Israeli policy in regard to school charges that parents are required to pay.

There is not much research to be found on the subject of parental participation fees in school expenses. The findings of this study expand the limited knowledge existing on this topic.

Based on a description of the national features of the Israeli society and educational system, this chapter will briefly describe various attempts conducted since the 1970s to decentralize the Israeli educational system and promote school autonomy. It will focus specifically, on the School-Based Management (SBM) policy, borrowed by educational policymakers and implemented in the Israeli educational system during late 1990s. The decision to borrow this policy did not follow policymakers’ recognition in the limitations and shortcomings of the centralized structure of control, which characterized the educational system since Israel became an independent state in 1948. Rather, it followed pressures coming from various stakeholders who considered centralized policy plans irrelevant and not enough sensitive to the variety of local circumstances and needs (David, 1989; Hanson, 1984; Nir, 2002; Nir et al., 2016). Therefore, more than 20 years later, it appears that the implementation of SBM created limited effects in terms of teachers and school leaders’ degrees of freedom and that the educational system still maintains its centralized structure and features. The main argument the present chapter will attempt to make is that borrowed policies have a limited capacity to promote significant change in the borrowing system when policymakers do not fully believe in the policy’s values and ideas and are reluctant to abandon current patterns of organizational behavior. Specifically, it will describe the process that characterized the borrowing and implementation of the SBM policy in the Israeli educational system and will discuss the main symptoms that characterized the policy borrowing process when policymakers were not fully committed to the values and mode of operation brought by the borrowed policy.

Studies have shown that teachers' perceptions and expectations of their working environment shape their perceived stress. The present study draws upon implicit leadership theory and builds on the job demands-control (JD-C) model to investigate whether there are differences in the implications of participative decision-making and paternalistic leadership for teachers' perceived stress in the Israeli Arab education system.

Data were collected through validated questionnaires returned by a two-stage cluster random sampling of 350 teachers randomly chosen from 70 Israeli Arab elementary schools. Paternalistic leadership and participative decision-making were considered as group-level variables to lower the risk of common method variance. The proposed model was tested through hierarchical regression analysis. Finally, to test the hypothesis that paternalistic leadership and participative decision-making standardized beta weights were statistically significantly different from each other, their corresponding 95% confidence intervals were estimated via bias corrected bootstrap (1000 re-samples).

The findings indicated differences in the levels of the principal's paternalistic leadership and participative decision-making as perceived by the Israeli Arab teachers. Also, the results indicated that participative decision-making was negatively correlated with teachers' perceived stress beyond the influence of paternalistic leadership.

Examining teachers' working conditions and resources can be important since they affect teachers' perceived stress, which may in turn affects school results in the Arab education system in Israel. This study can contribute to the development of training programs for teachers to improve and adapt principals' leadership practices to the sociocultural context of the Arab education system in Israel.

The recent move towards system‐wide diversity in the Israeli educational system has made the structure of public schools increasingly complex and fragmented, and has greatly influenced many aspects of the principalship. Today, principals in public schools are moving towards a dynamic definition of their role. Principals are being required to move from being routine‐managers to leader‐managers. This role change is reflected in four pivotal areas including: resource allocation, organizational framework, governing system and market structure. Contrary to traditional roles, Israeli principals are increasingly required to be environmental managers who mobilize resources and manage professional organizations with pluralistic governing systems in a competitive market structure. The success of local school initiatives depends upon principals′ abilities to adapt their roles to new realities inherent in such dynamic, diverse school networks.

The chapter looks at policies regarding access to higher education (HE) for the Palestinian Arab minority in Israel (PAMI). Recently, HE among PAMI has expanded compared to previous years, but the proportion of PAMI students in Israeli institutions of HE (14%) is still not equal to the percentage of PAMI (20%). The Council for Higher Education (CHE) in Israel has been trying to increase the accessibility of PAMI students in institutions of HE through the implementation of several projects and academic programs and the expectation of reaching 17% in 2021. The chapter has three main aims: (1) to describe the decisions and recommendations of CHE for increasing the rate of peripheral students in HE, (2) to trace their implementation in HE institutions, and (3) to investigate the influences of these policies in schools through interviews with secondary school principals and secondary students in PAMI schools to understand how they act to improve students’ awareness of these initiatives and to improve access to HE for their graduates. A qualitative-phenomenological study analyzes policy guidelines regarding HE for PAMI as set out by the two main committees established by the Israeli CHE. The findings may have international significance since similar difficulties are encountered in access to HE among underprivileged or peripheral populations in other world states.

Instructional leadership is an educational leadership approach in which principals are regularly and actively involved in a wide range of activities aimed at improving teaching and learning. The current study sought to answer how the principal's role in promoting parental involvement is part of their instructional leadership responsibility.

Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with 24 Israeli principals. Data analysis was a three-step process: sorting, coding, and categorizing.

This study revealed that principals encouraged two types of parental involvement: academic-oriented, designed to support student learning and achievement, and non-academic-oriented, designed to accomplish other goals. From the instructional leadership perspective, principals should mainly prioritize academic-oriented parental involvement. Implications and further research are discussed.

The question of how the role of principals in encouraging parental involvement can become a part of principals' instructional leadership has not yet been explored. The present study narrows this gap in the existing research literature.

The study's main goal is to investigate different leadership styles that characterize middle-level leaders, the intermediate leadership tier of role holders in school, as they practice leadership scenarios through active participation in a professional learning process of role-play simulation, using a social-ecological approach.

Thirty middle-level leaders from different Israeli high schools and districts participated in the study during an M.A. course in an educational leadership program. The authors used qualitative analysis to examine role-play simulations of leadership scenarios based on group debriefings. This content analysis was conducted within a two-dimensional theoretical framework composed of leadership style theory and a social-ecological model.

The study findings address four main leadership styles: authentic, transformational, participative and transactional. Regarding their appearance within different social-ecological layers, the interpersonal layer was the most salient one with a prominent appearance of transformational and authentic leadership styles. On the organizational and communal layers, authentic leadership was more prominent. The study findings demonstrate multidimensionality in both the leadership styles and social-ecological layers, as different styles appeared in different layers concurrently.

The findings may help articulate the nature and characteristics of middle-level school leadership. They may also provide relevant theoretical content and instructional strategy to develop simulation-based preparation programs for middle-level leaders.

The study findings highlight unique leadership characteristics of middle-level school leaders and suggest a contextual perception of their leadership styles within a social-ecological framework.