All federal states should, if you please, give an education and care guarantee in the event that the number of corona infections rises again, said the FDP politician to the German press agency: "Such a nationwide guarantee must also be on the agenda of the next meeting between the Chancellor and the Prime Minister. "
That sounds pithy - and quite unrealistic, as a look at the current stumbling blocks in everyday school life shows: Even now things are not going particularly well, and the "normal operation under pandemic conditions", which has been widely declared by the ministries of education, has very little of normality and a great deal in many places of pandemic ("This is the matter").
From the lows of everyday Corona to the heights of international education statistics: The OECD has presented its report, "Education at a Glance", hot off the press, with key figures on, among other things, the national education expenditure - and that could well be for Provide discussions in Germany ("Debate of the Week").
This newsletter is also about a real German institution, the Elterntaxi, about (un) happy children and young people and about what parents think of educational federalism.
Spoiler: little.
The "Kleine Pause" team wishes you a lot of reading enjoyment - and if you want to
recommend
something to us, please contact us at kleinepause@newsletter.spiegel.de
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Susmita Arp, Silke Fokken, Armin Himmelrath
That's going on
1. The parents taxi experiment
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Door up and down home: children get into a car after school (symbolic image)
Photo:
Ralf Hirschberger / dpa
130,000 people live in the Peine district in Lower Saxony.
The district recently made them a monetary offer: You should, if you please, bring your children to school in your own car instead of putting them in a school bus - 30 cents per kilometer driven were offered for this.
"We wanted to give parents who are afraid that their children could get infected in the full school buses an incentive to drive," said district press spokesman Fabian Laaß in an interview with SPIEGEL.
The whole thing should be an experiment to find out how the circle can react to the new challenges posed by the pandemic.
As is well known, experiments are there to try something - and to leave it again if necessary.
Fabian Laaß explains why the parent taxi experiment was terminated prematurely.
The Association of Education and Upbringing (VBE), the Verkehrsclub Deutschland (vcd) and the German Children's Fund approached the topic of parent taxis from a completely different angle: They were looking for incentives to ensure that as few school trips as possible are made in private cars.
One of the recommendations: not only adults should make decisions in transport policy, children and young people must also be able to contribute their point of view.
2. The burst ventilation dilemma
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Mask requirement in class: in Bavaria, you could also meet elementary school students (symbol picture)
Photo: Gregor Fischer / DPA
As is well known, there is a hygiene concept for teaching in this new school year, which the Conference of Ministers of Education approved and updated again last week (here is the link).
The ministers celebrate it as a uniform framework, but in fact it is just a fair-weather paper based on the lowest common denominator.
But above all: the countries themselves ensure that not much remains of the unity that has been invoked.
Take mouth and nose protection, for example: Bavaria will first introduce compulsory masks in class, while North Rhine-Westphalia has abolished it - perhaps also under the impression of a judgment according to which those who refuse to wear a mask should not simply be thrown out of class despite the obligation to wear a mask.
"The mask dispute is distracting," says SPIEGEL editor Silke Fokken annoyed in her comment - namely of all the serious weaknesses in German schools. This also includes the structural condition of the educational institutions: windows without handles, windows with opening locks, windows only on one side of the classroom. How to get the intermittent or cross ventilation is asked by many teachers (and by email also to us). And this is followed by a second question: How seriously can you take ministries of education that say that ventilation - Unsuitable classrooms are then no longer allowed to be used for lessons?
Lessons (almost) as always and real infection protection - that just doesn't work at the same time: a real dilemma.
If you want to delve a little deeper into this topic, we recommend this text by the colleagues at news4teachers.de.
And if you want to reduce your frustration afterwards, this text by Alex Rühle in the "Süddeutsche Zeitung" could help: It tells of teachers who were inspired by the crisis and who have developed exciting teaching projects.
3. What else was there
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"An algorithm has decided my future. I'm pissed off!" - This is what a demonstrator put on a sign in London in mid-August
Photo: HENRY NICHOLLS / REUTERS
The Federal Labor Court has rejected the blanket headscarf ban for teachers in Berlin.
A Muslim applicant who was not hired was discriminated against because of her religion.
Most of the time, students are happy when they don't have to take an exam.
However, this joy has turned into frustration among many school graduates: The exam grades that were missing due to Corona were replaced by an algorithm - and this caused the average to slip for many young people.
Debate of the week
Every year at the beginning of September the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) publishes its study "Education at a Glance", in German: "Education at a Glance".
On Tuesday it was that time again: 584 pages, packed with data on the education system from numerous countries.
And if you rummage through it (you can find the original report here at the OECD), you are guaranteed to come across topics with which you can entangle your friends, colleagues or school management in wild discussions.
Some examples?
Here you go:
Germany spends the equivalent of US $ 9,572 per year for every elementary school pupil - on the other hand, for pupils in secondary level I, it spends 11,975 US dollars and in upper secondary level as much as 15,466 US dollars.
Shouldn't the relationship actually be the other way around?
Germany pays full-time elementary school teachers an average annual salary of US $ 74,407 - the OECD average is US $ 43,942.
On the other hand, teachers in German primary schools work an average of 698 teaching hours per year - on the OECD average it is 778 hours.
Do you notice what?
A more detailed presentation of the results from the OECD Education Report can be found here.
Good to know
In the past few days, we have been busy with two studies that contain interesting results.
On the one hand, there is the current
Unicef report
, which deals with the well-being of children and young people in 41 countries around the world.
He clearly explains why children in affluent societies such as Germany are also unhappy: educational gaps, loneliness, and obesity can all be trigger factors.
It is worth taking a look at the results of this investigation.
The new
Ifo Education
Monitor is just as exciting
: Education economists asked thousands of parents about their assessments of federal education policy.
The result: Much more competencies in school policy should be pooled centrally with the federal government, some others should be handed over to the municipal level of the school authorities - the federal states, however, stated the respondents, should have less to say.
This can be interpreted as a strong expression of mistrust towards the education ministries of the federal states: Here you will find everything important about this study.
We hope to have provided you with enough material for discussion and information for the next few days during this "little break".
Please contact
us if you still have something hot on your nails! We look forward to receiving your mail at kleinepause @ newsletter .spiegel.de
.