The truth behind Germany's education 'disaster'

The latest PISA study has reveals a dramatic slump in attainment standards among German school pupils. What explains the collapse?

Photo by Taylor Flowe on Unsplash

A friend of mine works as a primary school teacher in a Berlin district synonymous countrywide with failed integration policies.

The school he works at has a bit of a reputation.

Before the current school year commenced, he received an enrollment list. Half of the two dozen children were German. However, by the time the school year started, just two of the German names were left.

Their parents had successfully sued the education board into giving them a place at a “better” school. Realising what had happened, the mother of one of the two remaining German kids contacted him before the semester and asked tearfully whether her child's future was ruined. The penny even dropped for the parents of a Spanish child, who also disappeared from the list.

By the end, the names that were left were almost all from the Balkans and the Middle East.

This is unlikely to be an isolated anecdote.

Ever more lawyers are specializing in suing education boards on behalf of such parents. One lawyer boasts that he charges upwards of €3,000 - but that doesn’t put off pushy parents, who start contacting him in November just in case they need legal backup the following summer.

The result is a de facto segregation in the German school system. Middle-class parents, who enjoy the shabby chic qualities of a district like Neukölln, lose their “anything goes” outlook on life when it comes to their kids.

Nervous that their children’s classmates in “problem schools” can barely speak German, middle class parents know how to bend the system to ensure their children are surrounded by Emils rather than Amirs.

The consequence: children who speak another language at home have precious little contact with native speakers even in the schoolyard.

Thus, it wasn’t surprising to read in the latest OECD international comparison of school achievement that there is a yawning gap in Germany between the scores of native versus immigrant children.