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Year after year, official figures confirm that the periphery, the northern and southern areas and poor inner-city neighborhoods, lags considerably behind the center of the country in almost every socioeconomic metric, including in the results of national standardized tests for every age-group. Children from the periphery do not do as well in these tests as their peers in the center of the country, where public funds are more forthcoming and the parents can afford to compensate for deficiencies in the public education system by all manner of privately-funded solutions. The result is that drop-out rates are higher, and matriculation success and higher education enrolment is lower, in the periphery.
Believing that education is the key to the individual's social mobility and the nation's economic strength, the Rashi Foundation has always invested significant resources in "leveling the playing field" for children from disadvantaged homes or living in under-resourced localities, so that their school experience is a true stepping-stone to higher education.
The schoolchildren are assisted in many different ways, wherever they are in the class: at the bottom (e.g Tafnit), middle (e.g Academia and High-School Academia) or top (e.g Madarom's Access to Higher Education). Many factors impact on their performance in school: the number and quality of teachers, the size of the learning group, the organizational strengths of the principal, the condition and accessibility of the physical premises, the child's emotional and social strengths, and even whether he or she is eating properly. Rashi has developed programs that tackle issues that prevent the child from fulfilling his scholastic potential (e.g.Full School, National School Lunch Program, Bat Yam 2010). We aim to help the children move to the next stage of education equipped, confident and motivated to succeed.
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