How the data explains the PISA debacle

Germany is experiencing the next PISA shock. A wide variety of explanations and interpretations are quickly put forward. A look at selected figures from the past few years allows us to classify the most important arguments.

The misery began at the turn of the millennium. Germany, the self-proclaimed land of poets and thinkers, was blindsided in 2001: the previous year, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) had launched an international study to compare the education systems of different countries. The "Program for International Student Assessment" (PISA) is intended to measure the school performance of 15-year-olds in the areas of mathematics, science and reading.

The results of the study will be published towards the end of 2001. The media response is overwhelming, politicians are shocked and soon there is talk of a "PISA shock". The President of the Association of German Chambers of Industry and Commerce (DIHK), Ludwig Georg Braun, says: "It couldn't have been worse."

Germany performs worse than its big neighbor France, worse than the average of all OECD countries, and significantly worse than the Finns, who received a lot of attention in the following years. This rude awakening led to numerous attempts at reform, but also to heated discussions. In the dispute over whether the three-tier school system might be cementing inequalities in society, Germany has since been asked to withdraw from the PISA study.

However, following the PISA shock, Germany has made progress: From 2006 onwards, the children tested in Germany achieved better results than their peers in France and the average of the other OECD countries. While the gap to the reading performance of the Finns in the first PISA study was still an eighth of the German result, this figure had shrunk to less than a twentieth by 2015.

The race to catch up is taking place with the friendly support of the Finns, who for their part are declining sharply. This is particularly evident in the math tests: while their results were on average just under a tenth higher than those of German pupils at the beginning, this lead was trimmed to a hundredth by 2015.

Reaching the limits during the pandemic

However, the German upward trend also came to an end by the middle of the last decade at the latest. Performance in the math tests began to fall again as early as 2012. There is a clear gap between the 2018 and 2022 studies in most of the countries tested. In Germany, the drop is particularly clear: the result is worse than ever, worse than in the shock year of 2000. In the math test, the gap to the OECD average peaked in 2012 and has since narrowed tenfold.

Among other things, the school closures during the coronavirus pandemic are blamed for this. The German school system "reached its limits" due to coronavirus, among other things, says Stefan Dull, President of the German Teachers' Association, to ntv.

Germany is actually ahead of the rest of Europe when it comes to school closures. However, how long the school gates remain closed varies greatly across Europe. So this figure alone cannot explain the PISA results. The ifo Institute points to the initial situation before the pandemic: The state of digitalization had made teaching from a distance more difficult. An ifo study on Europe's schools during the pandemic states: "Germany ranks last in terms of online learning platforms and resources."

Even in the simple progression of the PISA results, however, it can be seen that the downturn began in the middle of the last decade. Many experts are certain that the pandemic is not the cause of the drop in performance, it merely accelerated the decline. It made clear and widely visible what had long been clear to people in the education system.

"There is a shortage of skilled workers, migration has increased"

"We have been observing this trend for around ten years. Corona has only intensified it," confirmed sociologist Aladin El-Mafaalani to Stern magazine. The construction sites that experts see are manifold: digitalization is slow, the parental home is still decisive for success at school, the existing teaching staff are overworked. "The German school system is run down, there is a shortage of specialists. And migration has increased," says El-Mafaalani.

In fact, more and more children are attending German schools whose families have a history of immigration. Children who started their school career abroad, who mainly speak Ukrainian, Turkish or Farsi with their parents at home. Children who have had to deal with a refugee experience in their families and who have no one at home to help them with their homework. But also children who have always had a foreign language ahead of their classmates, as well as children who speak fluent German and nothing else.

According to the microcensus, around 28% of all children at German schools had a migrant background in 2008, rising to more than 41% in 2022. Some of these children perform much worse in the PISA studies. The country of birth and the language predominantly spoken at home have a major influence on the test results: In the last PISA study, children born abroad scored on average less than 80 percent of the points received by children born in Germany. The OECD average is more than 90 percent.

The language spoken at home not only has a major influence on reading skills. Mathematics comprehension also depends heavily on it: If German is the main language spoken at home, children achieve respectable results in PISA in an international comparison. With an average of 494 points, this group is well ahead of the OECD average in the math test and even ahead of the Finnish comparison group.

Another factor lurks behind the migration background

The situation is quite different for those pupils whose parents speak a different language: At 419 points on average, this group is well behind the average for OECD countries. In other countries, the differences are therefore far less marked, but in Germany the inequality is particularly great.

However, a large part of this inequality has only limited to do with the immigration history of a child's family. In Germany, the influence of poverty and wealth on educational success is still very strong. And immigrants are affected by poverty more often than average. According to the 2019 microcensus, around 12% of minors without a migration background live in families at risk of poverty. People of the same age with a migrant background are more than twice as likely to be affected. Around a third are considered at risk of poverty.

The OECD shows how difficult it is for the German school system to compensate for such inequalities by dividing all PISA participants into five equally sized groups. It differentiates the children according to their socio-economic status, i.e. their parents' income, occupation and educational qualifications, the number of books at home or the opportunities to do their homework in peace. The children in the first of the five groups are therefore particularly affluent, while those in the last are particularly disadvantaged.

In Germany, the children in the first group achieve much better PISA results than all other groups. They are roughly on a par with comparably affluent children in Estonia. However, the gap between them and the children in the other four groups is so great that the German children in the fourth group are only as successful as the most disadvantaged Estonian children.

Following the recent PISA shock, many experts are calling for more investment in the German education system. Germany is well below the OECD average in this respect. However, pumping money into schools alone will not solve the problem. This is because one factor is often forgotten that would be particularly important in reducing social inequalities: the care and education of the youngest children.

Daycare centers are the place where many educational decisions are made - and they are chronically understaffed. Not only do many parents suffer from this, but above all early childhood education and especially the opportunities of disadvantaged children.

Despite this, daycare centers are not structurally assigned to the Ministry of Education and are often only seen as a place of care. Minister Stark-Watzinger wants to change this. Many countries that perform better in the PISA study are also role models here.