On October 22 chancellor (prime minister) Angela Merkel summoned the premiers from all of Germany’s 16 states for an ‘education summit’ in Dresden. Its vaunted aim was to transform Germany from a mediocre performer into a dazzling “education republic”. Yet the chancellor’s powers to achieve this goal are limited.
Nobody thinks that Germany can afford mediocrity. If its performance on international tests improved from average to excellent, annual GDP growth would rise by 0.5-0.8 percentage points in the long run, says Ludger Wossmann, an economist at Ifo, a research institute in Munich. But the real stakes are higher. Almost half the children in some cities come from immigrant families; many speak mainly their mother tongue. In Germany parents’ social status plays a bigger role in children’s fates than in most other rich countries. As many as 8 percent of 15-17-year-olds are school dropouts; unemployment among them is three times higher than among university graduates. Yet, with Germany’s population ageing, “who will pay our pensions, if not the migrants?” asks Jorg Drager, head of education at the Bertelsmann Foundation.
Schools need to teach conduct as well as calculus, ensuring that minorities (and poor Germans) become fully functioning members of society. They are ill-equipped to do it. Germany is one of the few European countries that still divides children up at the age of ten. The cleverest go to gymnasien, the main route to university; the ordinary are sent to realschulen; and the dullards attend hauptschulen, often breeding-grounds for disaffection. Teaching methods have not changed “since the days of the Kaiser,” says Ties Rabe, a teacher and Social Democratic member of Hamburg’s legislature. Most children leave school before lunch, which is awkward for families with two working parents. Germany has enough child-care places for just 17 percent of children under three.
Ideology has often thwarted reform. Social Democrats and others on the left want students of different abilities to spend more time in the same school. The Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Ms. Merkel’s party, has long championed the three-tier system, partly because the tier-less alternative smelled to many of East German egalitarianism. Yet Merkel must keep her distance. Under Germany’s federal system, education is mainly the responsibility of the states. Premiers have no intension of yielding authority.
Tinkering with education is a risky political business. The CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, have been punished in state elections this year by parents angry over their handling of school reforms. Success, if it comes, is often apparent only after decades. But state governments are finding they have no choice. Dwindling numbers of children, especially in eastern Germany, troubled immigrants in the cities and a flight from hauptschulen are forcing them to rethink how they organise schools. Fortunately a “demographic dividend” from fewer children will free some €8-9 billion (Rs.50,400-56,700 crore) a year by 2015 to help pay for change.
Hamburg is more than usually chaotic, with eight types of school at secondary level. A third of its children are from immigrant backgrounds and half are socially disadvantaged, says Alexandra Dinges-Dierig, a former education minister. With the hauptschulen withering, Hamburg plans to merge all varieties of secondary school bar the gymnasien into new ‘neighbourhood schools’ that will offer custom-tailored learning, more practical experience outside school and a slower track to university. Hamburg’s schools have already been liberated from centralised bureaucracy. School directors hire their own teachers, for example.
This is bold stuff, especially coming from a state run by the CDU. But Hamburg’s two-tier structure may become the norm. Berlin and Schleswig-Holstein are doing something similar. More states are testing pre-schoolers’ German, and tutoring those who don’t measure up. Until four years ago fewer than half the states had centralised school exams, says Wossmann. Now all but one do, at least for the pre-university test, the abitur. Testing, which helps to make schools more accountable, plus greater autonomy seem to be two of the surest ways to improve schools’ performance.
Wossmann argues that Germany should follow the Netherlands in letting parents spend public money on any type of school they want. But for Germany’s conservative educators, that is likely to be a reform too far.
(Excerpted and adapted from The Economist)