A Six-Year Follow-up of Academic Achievement in An Israeli Elementary School Integration Project

Abstract

An integration project initiated at the Gush Etzion Regional Elementary School in Israel at the beginning of the 1984/85 school year has now been running for six years. In the program ethnically Oriental pupils from a lower achievement-oriented environment and lower socioeconomic status were assigned to integrated classrooms together with higher achievement-oriented and higher socioeconomic-status students of Western ethnic background. A number of interventions designed to promote improved academic achievement were implemented at the school. Analysis indicated that pupils of lower socioeconomic status assigned to the experimental group achieved significantly higher reading scores than pupils of lower socioeconomic status in the control group attending a nonintegrated school. However, pupils of higher socioeconomic status studying in the integrated school and belonging to a comparison group achieved higher scores on the research instrument than members of either the experimental or the control groups despite the interventions undertaken to close the achievement gap. It appears that, although the interventions undertaken contributed to academic success of the experimental group subjects, they did not go all the way towards closing the achievement gap between lower and higher socioeconomic-status pupils.