Germans and Schools

A report came out yesterday....from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA)....from the results of a survey on education across the globe.  For the Germans....it was a kind of negative report.  It didn't really give Germany a thumbs up or a thumbs down....but a middle kind of rating....which upset a number of folks because of efforts over the past five years.

Naturally, some politicians in Germany quickly came up with their angle of how to fix this.

The opposition party....the SPD....thinks that the teacher's path via the university system is kind of haphazard.  They want standards....where you ensure better and more qualified teachers enter the system.  If you think about it....it'd probably dilute ten percent...maybe even twenty percent of the entry group from ever getting into the teacher profession.  I'm not one to forecast long term problems usually....but you might fix one problem and then create another problem in a decade, with a problem of replacing retiring teachers.

Another item suggested by the politicians is the idea of a full-day of school. Most German schools wrap up around 1:30 each day.  Politicians think a full day would do wonders.  More time in class, more results.

There are issues with this time suggestion of course.  You'd have to convince teachers to accept another hour or two which I doubt they'd accept without a major pay-raise.  Some would say the stress of another 90 minutes would be too much for them, and ask for retirement.  Some would suggest that if a kid didn't pick up the information after what they currently offer....they would doubt that the kid improves with another hour or two.

Educational agenda folks exist in Germany...just as they do in the US.  If you offer up a negative report, then it means something is broke.  Rarely do you go back and review how these reports was generated or what they gathered to make the data "pure and clean".

My guess is that a couple of standards will be tossed into the pot and approved...and it trims off at least three percent of the folks going after educational degrees in the future.  That doesn't really fix the substandard teacher mess in existence today, but it'd help toward 2020 and beyond.

As for the longer hours?  I suspect that the teacher's union will stand up and accept 60 minutes onto each day....with a five-percent pay-raise attached and some one-time bonus (figure at least 700 Euro).  Forget anything more than 60 minutes because it just won't sell.  Oh, and along the way....some professor will eventually show a statistical analysis that another sixty minutes would likely only benefit twelve percent of the students anyway (just my humble guess on that suggestion).

Just a personal observation here, but if you look around November and December time-frame in your local German paper....you will notice all of these after-school extended private study deals to help your kid improve his results.  Most expect at least 200 Euro a month for this two to three hours per week schedule.  Over the past two decades, these study operations have grown and have a fair amount of business.  Why?  The answer is that kids aren't picking up what the teacher's expected of them in class....and they need private tutors to explain a lesson in a totally different fashion and in a smaller setting of twelve kids.

So a worried parent tosses 200 Euro a month for five months onto his must-pay schedule and has to find cuts in the family budget to afford that....if the kid is in serious jeopardy of screwing up his grades.  If you have two kids....400 Euro might be expanded.  And that's just for one weak area...what if the kid had two weak areas?

There's a problem that probably exists, but I doubt that politicians can ever get to the level of thinking at the local school level and grasping the significance of one simple lesson in math being a failure.