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Data from the 1983-84 Israeli IEA (International Association for the Evaluation of Education Achievement) science study were used to explore gender-related differences (and their determinants) in the learning of science. The sample was composed of 1,934 ninth-grade students. The study involved several measures of science learning, ten attitudinal measures, and items and errors classification. Differences between boys and girls were observed in some measures of science performance-particularly in the physical sciences, in items with lower estimates of "opportunity to learn," and in specific kinds of errors. Gender-related differences were also observed in the predictive model of achievement, using science-specific affective measures. The discussion raises the cognitive and affective readiness of boys and girls for learning science.

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This article describes how school decentralization and restructuring policy in Israel is viewed by principals of autonomous schools. Like many western countries, the Israeli school system is going through reforms that include decentralization policies and school empowerment. Autonomous schools (Israel's version of restructuring) are the center of decentralization policy. In Israel, unlike some other countries, decentralization is characterized by informal changes, seldom accompanied by legislation, and therefore not followed by open public debate. This paper presents the results of a qualitative study among 50 principals of autonomous schools in Israel that explored the principals' insights or ‚mindscapes’ ( Sergiovanni, 1995 ) concerning decentralization and restructuring policy in Israel. The findings shed light on the possibilities and hardships that these principals face and on the complexity of implementing decentralization policies.

National ideology, institutional arrangements, and immigrant community self‐image should be taken into account in order to understand the way immigrant students insert themselves into their host society. We found that immigrant students from the CIS (the former Soviet Union) adopted a “semipermeable enclave” mode of integration into the Israeli education system in the 1990s. CIS immigrants' high self‐esteem along with the schools' so‐called “pluralistic ideology” and ineffective arrangements to apply the official assimilationist national ideology produced this new absorption pattern. Because immigrant children's integration into schools is a dynamic and dialectic process resulting from the interaction between immigrants and the host society, its analysis must take into consideration not only educational policies, but also social conditions such as power relations between different ethnic groups, as well as the characteristics of the specific immigrant community.