Germany Searching For Education Solutions

When German politicians hear the word "Pisa," the last thing that comes to mind is the Italian city with the trademark leaning tower. Instead, the word conjures up visisons of test scores, especially mediocre test scores, that the country's students made on an international test that goes by the acronym of "Pisa."

Translated, Pisa stands for the Program for International Student Assessment, and the results sent a jolt through the German education community when they were released in 2001. High school students in Germany, the country once known as the land of poets and thinkers, ranked 25th out of 32 countries in overall reading, mathematics and scientific literacy.

German Education Minister Edelgard Bulmahn was among those officials dismayed by the rankings. The results "show that we have considerable flaws in our school system," Bulmahn said recently.

The search for solutions

Confronted with these flaws, Bulmahn and other educators began a national and international search for solutions. One product of that search will be the introduction of national education standards, something Germany has not had in the past because the individual states are responsible for education.

"The introduction of the national standards should improve the quality of instruction and the performance of our students," Bulmahn said Tuesday, when she released a study backing the introduction of these guidelines.

The goal of the standards presented by the government is to establish a minimum level of performance for a student at a certain age. In German reading comprehension, for instance, a student would achieve the minimum level if he or she could understand a simple text. A student who could read between the lines would be ranked at the highest level.

Role of individual schools stressed

This national approach is based in part on the international research that officials performed after the unsatisfactory scores in the Pisa study were released. Reflecting this research, the new standards will not dictate the method of instructions that schools have to use. "The countries that performed successfully on the PISA tests showed that it makes more sense to organize the educational process around the desired results, instead of dictating to teachers how they should organize their classes," Bulmahn said.

Two of the countries to which Bulmahn referred are Finland and Sweden. Finnish students led the rankings on reading literacy, and Swedish students placed ninth.

Role model Sweden?

Sweden's approach has caught Bulmahn's eye. Twenty-five years ago, the Scandinavian country's school system was watched over by a government department staffed by 1,000 people. The department, known as Skolverket, controlled the budget, teaching slots and curriculum. "We were not very effective," said Mats Ekholm, the current general secretary of the Skolverket.

Today, all of that has changed. The Skolverket has only 220 employees, and the individual schools make the hiring and instruction decisions. The Skloverket serves now as an inspector, overseeing assessment tests of the students' learning.

Bulmahn would like to create such a national agency like Sweden's. But she could run into opposition from the states. Hesse's culture minister Karin Wolff, who heads a group of state officials working on the national standards, said on Tuesday that she had nothing against the idea, but that education still remained a state matter.

Standards to be started in 2004

Wolff's group has been working on the standards since 2001, and the first goals are to be introduced in the 2004-2005 school year. They will apply to German, math and foreign languages.

The concept is being supported by others as well. "It isn’t right that when a student moves from one state to another, it can take up to two years to bridge the gap in standards," said the education spokeswoman for the Greens party, Grietje Bettin.