New study reveals why preschool teacher assistant reforms succeed or fail

When a government rolls out an ambitious education reform, the announcement tends to grab the headlines while the messy work of actually making the reform happen on the ground is largely ignored. Yet a growing body of research suggests that the fate of any public policy is decided not in the halls of the legislature but in the daily routines of the people tasked with carrying it out. A new study published in the International Journal of Child Care and Education Policy offers a detailed, data-driven look at exactly this process, using one of Israel’s most significant early childhood initiatives—the Second Preschool Teachers’ Assistants Reform—as a real-world laboratory for understanding when and why public policies succeed or fail.

The reform, introduced in 2015, emerged from a crisis in Israel’s preschool system. In the years following the national rollout of free public education for children aged three and four, roughly ninety percent of children in that age group were absorbed into public preschools, placing enormous strain on existing staffing structures. A single preschool teacher, aided by one assistant, could be responsible for as many as thirty-five children, a ratio that made meaningful pedagogical intervention nearly impossible. The government’s response was to significantly increase preschool budgets so that classrooms with thirty or more children could employ a second assistant. But the reform went beyond staffing: it included an enriched curriculum, structured training programs for assistants, additional support for teachers, and the appointment of a lead preschool teacher for every cluster of fifteen preschools to support educational teams and strengthen community relationships.

What makes the reform an ideal case study, the researchers argue, is that although it was mandated by Israel’s central government, its actual implementation varied dramatically from one municipality to another. Israel operates as a unitary state in which local governments function primarily as the implementing arm of national, standardized policies rather than as autonomous political entities. At the same time, local authorities are expected to achieve functional and financial independence without necessarily receiving sufficient funding from the state to do so, forcing them to develop innovative approaches to generating their own revenue. The result is a hybrid system combining neoliberal practices with centralized national policy, in which some municipalities have far more de facto power and independence than others, even when their formal, legal authority is identical.

To untangle how this variability shaped the reform’s fate, the research team—Ayelet Rachmian, Anna Uster, and Dana R. Vashdi—surveyed 174 preschool teachers and assistants working across 58 preschools in northern Israel. All respondents were female, reflecting the demographic composition of Israel’s preschool workforce. The sample spanned three distinct regions: the Jezreel Valley, the Gilboa Valley, and the city of Acre, which differ markedly in socioeconomic status and governance structure, with the valley preschools overseen by regional councils and Acre governed by a city municipality. Eighty-eight percent of the preschools served secular communities and twelve percent served religious ones, while eighty-four percent were Jewish and sixteen percent Arab. The researchers controlled for location, religious sector, national sector, and teacher seniority to ensure that their findings reflected the mechanisms they were testing rather than background demographics.

The theoretical backbone of the study draws on two influential frameworks in public administration. The first is principal-agent theory, which describes relationships in which one party—the principal, in this case the central government—depends on another party—the agent, here the local government—to act on its behalf. According to this framework, agents who possess greater political and financial autonomy require less monitoring and are better positioned to adapt a reform to local conditions, steer it in directions suited to their communities, and marshal the resources needed to implement more of its elements. The second framework is street-level bureaucracy theory, which holds that frontline workers—in this context, the lead preschool teachers—are not mere conduits for policy but active interpreters who translate centrally conceived directives into concrete practice.

The study’s central hypothesis was that the teaching staff’s perceptions of their local government’s autonomy would shape the extent to which the reform was actually implemented, which would in turn drive measurable educational outcomes. To capture these constructs, the team combined validated instruments: perceptions of local autonomy were measured using items from established scales covering financial budgeting decisions, internal procedures, the educational agenda, and reform decisions; the degree of implementation was assessed through the lead teacher’s judgment of whether specific reform components, such as staff training and the receipt of additional budget, had actually occurred, scored on a fourteen-point checklist; and preschool success was measured using the Ministry of Education’s MABATIM assessment, which tracks each child’s progress in cognitive development, motor abilities, communication, and socio-emotional functioning on a five-point scale, with teacher ratings collected in the middle and at the end of the year.

The analytical approach was correspondingly rigorous. Because the implementation measure was a count variable, the researchers used Poisson regression to test the link between perceived autonomy and the depth of implementation, and linear regression to test the link between implementation and preschool success. Mediation and moderated mediation effects were examined using bootstrapping-based procedures that estimate indirect effects at high, average, and low levels of the proposed moderator. That moderator was transformational leadership, assessed with the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire, a widely used instrument that captures the degree to which a leader articulates a compelling vision, provides individualized consideration, and inspires followers to transcend their immediate self-interest in service of collective goals.

The findings confirmed the study’s core predictions. Teachers’ perceptions of their local government’s autonomy were positively and significantly related to the extent of the reform’s implementation, even after accounting for location, sector, and seniority. In other words, where staff believed their municipality had the freedom and capacity to make its own decisions, more elements of the reform actually got implemented. This deeper implementation, in turn, was associated with better objective outcomes for children across the assessed developmental domains. Most strikingly, the effect of implementation on preschool success depended on the leadership style of the lead teacher. In preschools led by teachers with stronger transformational leadership, the relationship between implementation and success was amplified, suggesting that vision-driven, supportive leadership acts as a catalyst that converts well-executed policy into genuine developmental gains for children.

For the researchers, these results underscore a lesson that extends well beyond Israeli preschools. Public policies frequently fail not because they are poorly conceived but because policymakers devote far more attention to identifying effective policies than to creating the conditions necessary for their successful execution. In centralized governance systems, granting local governments meaningful discretion—what scholars describe as freedom from central interference, freedom to initiate locally beneficial activities, and the ability to reflect local identity—can improve policy outcomes while still maintaining national standards. The study also highlights the practical importance of investing in the leadership capabilities of frontline professionals, since even a fully funded reform delivered through a preschool without an inspiring, mobilizing leader may fail to translate into better outcomes for the children it is meant to serve.

The implications for governments worldwide are concrete. As the global knowledge economy intensifies pressure on nations to improve their educational systems, top-down reforms will remain a favored instrument. But the Israeli case demonstrates that success requires effective communication, collaboration, and coordination between central policymakers and the local actors who implement their visions, along with genuine reciprocity between the two levels. It also suggests that perception matters as much as structure: when implementers believe the institutions above them are capable and autonomous, they commit more fully to the reform effort. For education systems grappling with how to stretch limited resources across expanding enrollments, the message is clear—design policies with implementation in mind, empower local governments to adapt them, and cultivate transformational leaders at the classroom level, because the children in the back row of a crowded preschool are counting on all three.