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Children on their way to school: the attempt to compensate for family inequalities has apparently been unsuccessful
Photo: Peter Kneffel / picture alliance / dpa
PISA studies, the Federal Constitutional Court and a large number of educational researchers agree: Equal opportunities do not exist in the German school system.
Instead, coincidences, unrealized responsibility and sometimes arbitrariness determine whether children receive good or bad instruction.
Since the first PISA study in 2000, the finding has been repeated that almost a quarter of 15-year-olds do not achieve the lower level of competence in reading, mathematics and natural sciences.
And this dramatic number does not even cover the whole misery: Children with special educational needs are not usually counted - after all, almost ten percent of a year.
The attempt to compensate for family inequalities is apparently unsuccessful: Neither rescheduling for school enrollment, repeat classes, compensation for disadvantages, all-day schools, school social work or other support measures lead to success.
The solution to the problem therefore does not lie in further additive measures, but in guaranteeing a high-quality educational offer as a minimum standard.
In November 2021, the Federal Constitutional Court made a memorable judgment on this: Children and young people have a “entitlement to compliance with a minimum standard of educational offers that is indispensable for their equal opportunities to develop into independent personalities”.
This now has to be spelled out in terms of content.
Lots of research, lots of results, but there was no standard debate
A lot of research has been done over the past 20 years to describe the quality of teaching.
There were many results, but there was no standard debate.
It would have been necessary in particular for the last two major school reforms: inclusion and digitization.
For example, more than ten years after the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities came into force, it is still unclear which empirically verifiable characteristics characterize inclusive teaching at all.
So far, nationally binding standards only exist in relation to teacher training and subject-related standard standards in order to make the achievements of the students measurable.
Instead, the quality of the educational offerings depends to a large extent on the commitment of the individual school and its teachers.
This can be illustrated with data from the German education report from 2018: While 71 percent of the students with special educational needs at special schools do not achieve a school-leaving certificate, this applies to their schooling in mainstream schools in Hamburg only for 29 percent and in Thuringia only for 36 percent .
High risk of not getting a school diploma
In other words: Anyone who – for whatever reason – does not end up in a regular school has more than twice the risk of not graduating from school in the end than a regular student.
The same applied to distance learning during the lockdown: Whether your own child received an adequate school offer did not even differ from school to school, but even from teacher to teacher.
What we therefore need: not only the measurement of school performance at the end, but also process-related control that examines the quality of teaching and presents a uniform framework in the sense of standards.
In any case, the previous attempt to capture this in Germany through school inspections has failed: in the meantime, a number of federal states have suspended the comprehensive external evaluation of their schools (e.g. Hesse, Thuringia and Saxony) or switched to internal evaluations (no findings are yet available on their effectiveness). ).
If one also looks at the individual quality areas of the state-specific quality frameworks, it is striking how arbitrarily the quality features are set, and it remains inexplicable why, for example, Brandenburg has six, Bavaria four and Thuringia only three quality areas.
Label assignment without necessary and verifiable criteria
The call for standards has also been in vain so far - a school can still label itself as inclusive, digital or otherwise without the need for necessary and verifiable criteria.
However, if central aspects of school quality are only regulated within the school – or not at all – and quality frameworks for schools as a whole primarily reflect the respective state political colour, national specifications for school quality and their minimum requirements are all the more urgent.
Therefore, the constitutional requirement of a minimum standard of school education must be accompanied by a national quality debate about teaching standards.
Only in this way can there be any talk of equal opportunities in the German school system.
