Every three years in Germany, there's a test and evaluation of students (15-year-old's), and the testing folks rank the German kids among other nations.
So N-TV (German commercial news) brought up this topic here in the morning. It's not exactly good news.
Reading, math and sciences 'scores' are lower than three years ago. The PISA test concludes that scoring positives peaked around ten years ago, and it's been downward ever since that point.
Why the trend? Well, the study says that disadvantaged backgrounds, with a lack of teachers....are the stumbling blocks here. True or false? Unknown. The study did readily demonstrate that immigration kids (first generation) are getting dismal grades in reading and it probably weighs upon the grades and tests a great deal. Resolving this? Usually it gets resolved in the second generation, as those kids are fully integrated into the society.
Another long-term problem for the Bundestag to solve? Here's the thing....education is generally regarded as a state affair (not a national affair). As much as journalists try to make this into a national problem.....state political folks will tell you that it's a problem that ought to be worked upon regionally or by state efforts.
2 comments:
Although, I have to say the sheer volume of parental involvement that's expected makes it incredibly difficult for migrants. If my kids speak German better than I do, how the hell am I meant to correct their homework... I mean math, music, English, Chem, etc, fine. But if you've come from another country with only a year 9 education your kids are pretty screwed.
I tend to agree. But you can take over fifty percent of the German parents and give them the same core material (for that 15-year-old) and they'd have trouble with it as well. I pulled up the PISA test material for Brit kids and took a couple of language questions, and had no trouble. The math questions? They were built into situation and word questions where you had to devise a formula to reach the solution. Maybe if you gave me 30 minutes per problem, I'd come up with the basic formula to work....but this was a timed test and I doubt if you got more than eight minutes per problem to work out the details. Oddly, these are all math skills that I didn't really need over the past forty years since graduating from school.
German teachers (going back to 2014) have talked a great deal about the new students, and the difficulty in handling them. Maybe if the schools had hired up private tutors and spent four months getting them up to speed...things would have worked better. On top of that, some teachers will readily talk about PTSD problems with the kids, and that serious mental health issues exist with some of the kids who came out of the war zone.
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