Reading, Writing and Reform
June 24, 2002
Following media reports about the ranking of Germany's states in a regional comparison of results from the international PISA study, Germany's education authorities say they want to reform the country's school and university systems.
According to the Sunday edition of the mass-circulation Bild newspaper, Federal Education Minister Edelgard Buhlmann of the Social Democrats plans to release a paper this week calling for the creation of a special task force to oversee the reforms. Currently, German schools are run at the state level.
Buhlmann has set an ambitious goal: She wants Germany to be among the top five countries in the world in student performance rankings within 10 years.
Her plans foresee 10,000 schools offering extended hours by 2007. Presently, most German students only attend classes during the morning. The government will reportedly allocate 4 billion euro ($3.87 billion) to carry out the reforms. According to the Bild report, the task force will control the distribution of reform-related funding to the individual states.
In addition, an independent agency will be established to periodically monitor standards of education and progress in German schools. In an interview with the "Kölner Sonntag-Express" newspaper, Buhlmann said she would also like to establish a domestic version of the PISA exam.
When the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development first released the results of the 32-country comparison of literacy among 15-year-old students, it sparked a national debate in Germany. The country with Europe's largest economy scored 21st, just 1 point away from falling in the bottom third.
Though the results of the PISA-E study won't be officially released until Thursday, Bavarian education minister Monika Hohlmeier confirmed the state rankings published by the Munich-based newsweekly "Focus" over the weekend. For several weeks, the German press has published leaked details from the report with the assertion that conservative opposition-led states fared better than those governed by the Social Democrats. But Sunday's list was the first to include results from each state. Bavaria and Baden-Württemburg ranked highest in almost every category.
Bavaria's premier, Edmund Stoiber, who is also the opposition Union bloc's chancellor candidate, used his state's top ranking as a campaign tool on Sunday. Speaking in Leipzig, he said the results were proof of the "failure" of the governments in Social Democrat-led states to educate their children. He said kids in those states would have fewer opportunities than those in Christian Democrat-led regions.
Responding to the latest figures in an interview with the Berlin newspaper Tagesspiegel, the head of the German Parent Association called on parents in the states that scored poorly to file a suit in the Federal Constitutional Court against lawmakers. Hendricks said that lawmakers are legally obliged to ensure the same standard of living in each German state and that the state study illustrates a deep divide in the quality of education between different states.