Germans shocked by dreary school test results

BERLIN, Germany (Reuters) -- Germans, proud of philosophers and writers such as Nietzsche and Goethe, have long assumed their schools were among the best in the world.

But they have been shocked out of their complacency by an international comparison of students in 32 countries by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) which put German schools in 25th position.

The land of the "Dichter und Denker" (poets and philosophers) was stunned to find its students were in the bottom third of the "PISA" test -- far behind top-scoring Finland and lagging Italy, the United States and Spain which the Germans had assumed to have inferior schools.

"Are German students dumb?" asked the influential weekly magazine Der Spiegel in a cover story that cataloged many of the weaknesses in the country's schools.

"The public is up in arms about how dumb our students turned out to be," wrote Berlin's Tageszeitung newspaper. "They can't read, they can't write and forget about mathematics. German students are near the top of the list for incompetence."

The first-ever global survey of the key skills of teen-agers involved students around the world and included 265,000 15-year-old German students. They were tested in the summer of 2000 in reading comprehension, mathematics and science and the results were released last month.

To add insult to injury, the PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) test also showed that fewer Germans reached the top scores than in 12 of the 15 European Union states.

Stunned by the poor performance, politicians and education experts have called for far-reaching reforms of the country's schools.

The test found that only nine percent of German pupils were able to understand the complex texts they read, putting them on a level with Austria and Switzerland but a long way behind Britain, with 16 percent or the United States with 12 percent.

But the real nightmare for German educators was at the other end of the scale -- 10 percent of the pupils tested were unable to process even the most simple of texts, and another 13 percent just reached the lowest level.

This puts Germany ahead of only four other countries in the reading comprehension part of the study, two of which (Latvia and Brazil) are not even members of the OECD.

Political lethargy

Political leaders seem unable to overcome the lethargy which has left the education system stagnating for years.

A conference of federal education and cultural affairs ministers after the results were released offered few concrete ideas and produced instead a list of vague statements such as the one promising to take "measures for the effective encouragement of children who are educationally disadvantaged."

Dietmar Bronder, an official for a national Working Group on Lower Secondary Schools, said that children from disadvantaged backgrounds, such as inner city districts, had no chance to catch up with other students in more prosperous regions.

Juergen Baumert, the chief academic advisor in Germany for the PISA study, said he was shocked at the difference in the results of children in low and high income districts.

"I did not expect a pupil's achievement to depend so much on their social background," he said.

But Sabine, a teacher at a primary school in Kreuzberg, one of Berlin's lower-income neighborhoods with a high percentage of foreign-born students, said the results were anything but astonishing.

"The results don't surprise me at all," she said.

She believes that one of the worst aspects of the German school system is that university-bound students are separated from those headed for trade schools at around the age of 11.

"The children internalize the feeling at a young age that nothing will become of them," she said.

Children whose parents had come to Germany as immigrants had the worst results and formed the largest group of pupils who failed to reach the lowest level of literacy tested.

Michael Buersch, a member of parliament for the ruling Social Democrats, said that of the children who go to upper secondary school and take the school-leaving exam which leads to university entrance, only 3.9 percent have a foreign background.

"This is an ominously explosive development," he told parliament.

Nobody to blame

Accusations are already flying between the German government, opposition parties, federal ministries and teachers.

Germany's federal system means that the blame for the country's poor showing in the PISA study can be pushed from one post to another, as each of the 16 federal states are responsible for education within their state.

Education Minister Edelgard Bulmahn could thus deflect criticism that followed the study's release and say that she was not responsible for the state of the country's schools.

Josef Kraus, leader of the 150,000-member German Teachers' Association, said the problem was less one of teaching and more the fact that parents do not participate sufficiently in their children's education.

Juergen Kluge, head of the international consulting firm McKinsey in Germany, estimated it would cost about $3 billion to put German schools back on track.

The sorry state of German schools also worries employers. The president of the German Employers' Federation, Dieter Hundt, said there was a desperate need for reform.

"Some 22 percent of our pupils are illiterate," he said.

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