97% of Israeli Ninth-Graders Failed to Meet Science Standards in Results the Ministry Kept From the Public

Israel's Education Ministry suppressed national exam data showing that just 3% of ninth-grade students cleared the science curriculum benchmark, figures that were ultimately leaked to Israeli broadcast media and have since shaken the country's education establishment.

The results come from Israel's 2025 Meitzav standardised tests, administered by the National Authority for Measurement and Evaluation in Education (RAMA), an independent body operating within the Education Ministry.

Education Minister Yoav Kisch ordered that the science scores be withheld from the wider public release issued earlier this month, directing that they be shared with school administrators only. The data was subsequently leaked to Channel 12, exposing a collapse in measurable academic achievement that cuts across multiple subjects, year groups and demographic sectors.

2025 Meitzav Results

The scale of the failure is striking by any measure. Of all ninth-grade students who sat the science Meitzav exam, just 3% met the proficiency benchmark set by the ministry's own curriculum. A further 16% came close to the standard but fell short. The remaining 81% did not meet the expectations the ministry itself established for their age group. Crucially, 54% outright failed the test.

The problem extends well beyond science. Sixth-grade Meitzav results in the same data release showed that only 37% of students met the maths benchmark, and only 36% cleared the standard in English.

A separate tranche of ninth-grade English results, released roughly two weeks before the science figures were leaked, found that only 20% of students in that year group met curriculum expectations. In native Hebrew language performance, 38% of ninth-graders met the standard, which was the strongest result across all tested subjects and still represented a majority failing to reach the bar.

The benchmark the ministry applies is not an aspirational external standard. It defines satisfactory mastery of the official curriculum material students are expected to have been taught, meaning the results reflect how many pupils absorbed what they were supposed to have learned in class.

Bedouin, Haredi and Arabic Schools Face Steepest Shortfalls

The Meitzav data makes clear that the crisis is not uniform across Israel's highly segmented school system. Disaggregated figures show that performance gaps between sectors are vast, and that the national average of 3% in science obscures how much worse outcomes are in particular communities.

In English, only 9% of students at Arabic-speaking schools met curriculum requirements, compared to 27% at Hebrew-speaking schools. The most severe results came from southern Bedouin communities, where 86% of students demonstrated low levels of English proficiency and only 1% met the curriculum standard.

For the first time, Haredi girls' schools participated in the Meitzav English exam; 7% of those students met the required level, against 16% in the national-religious system and 31% in the Hebrew secular sector.

Observers have noted for years that Haredi boys' schools largely do not participate in Meitzav testing at all. According to a legal challenge heard by Israel's High Court, students in the Independent Education network, which operates Haredi schools, do not sit Meitzav exams, meaning the leaked figures still exclude a significant segment of the school-age population. The full picture of Israeli science and maths literacy is therefore likely to be more severe than even the leaked results suggest.

Kisch Withholds Science Scores, Disputes Accuracy

According to Channel 12's report, Education Minister Yoav Kisch personally directed that the ninth-grade science scores not be included in the partial results released to the public earlier this month. The scores were distributed only to school administrators. A ministry official had taken a similar approach with the international TIMSS 2023 results in December 2024, with Globes reporting at the time that the figures had been released at the last moment to limit critical coverage, and that a senior ministry source had described the decision as an attempt to avoid reporters asking questions.

Once the Channel 12 report aired, Kisch moved quickly to attack the data's credibility rather than its content. 'The data published today on Channel 12 is unreliable and inaccurate,' he said in a statement, accusing the RAMA officials who provided the material to journalists of acting improperly. 'Publishing them in this manner reflects contempt for Israel's students, teachers, principals and educators who have worked with tremendous dedication, especially during the difficult years we have gone through since the beginning of the war,' he added.

Kisch claimed he had received an internal ministry audit of RAMA pointing to alleged failures including a lack of transparency, unexplained changes in measurement methods and conflicts between RAMA staff and ministry professionals. He stated a thorough investigation would follow. RAMA has not responded publicly to those specific allegations, and the leaked figures themselves have not been retracted.

TIMSS 2023 Data Confirms Decline Predates Leaked Scores

The Meitzav findings do not stand alone. Israel's performance in the 2023 cycle of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), the global benchmark administered to eighth-graders across 44 countries, had already documented a severe deterioration. According to the official TIMSS 2023 international results, Israel dropped from 9th place globally in maths in 2019 to 23rd in 2023, and from 16th to 25th in science over the same period.

Israeli eighth-graders recorded an average decline of 32 points across both subjects between 2019 and 2023, against a global average drop of 11 to 12 points. The Times of Israel reported that the proportion of students classified as struggling in both subjects rose from one in eight in 2019 to one in five in 2023, while the share classified as excelling fell from one in seven to one in 13. Arabic-speaking students experienced a sharper drop than their Hebrew-speaking peers, declining 56 points in maths and 49 in science, compared to 26 and 29 points respectively in Hebrew-speaking schools.

Israel's ministry attributed the TIMSS decline partly to COVID-19, noting that the country imposed 130 days of school closures, far above the 49 days recorded in Sweden and 64 in the United Kingdom. Both of those countries recorded improvements in maths scores over the same period. Prof. Michal Zion of Bar-Ilan University's Faculty of Education identified a deeper structural issue, telling Israel Hayom that English studies in Israel were 'in serious trouble' and that alignment between the Israeli curriculum and international testing standards remained inadequate.

A country that built its economic identity on scientific excellence is now grappling with data showing that identity has no foundation in its classrooms.