Education Officials Press Ahead With Work on Standards

Jürgen Plenefisch has learned one thing about the German school system in his years in the country's classrooms -- Grades don't always mean a lot.

"As long as there are no official standards, every school has been judging performance based on its own criteria," the Berlin teacher said this week. "Because teachers have been unable to compare notes, to look outside the school door, so to speak, these standards became entrenched."

The issue also has drawn the attention of education officials from Germany's 16 states who are charged with setting education policy. "For the same type of work, different grades are given in different schools," said Karin Wolff, who chairs the officials' group.

Work on standards pushed

As a result of these discrepancies, education officials decided on Thursday evening to intensify their work on national education standards, something Germany has not had in the past because the individual states are responsible for education. The leaders' goal is to complete the standards this year and have the binding regulations in place for all schools by the 2004-2005 school year.

The standards will establish a minimum level of performance for a student at a certain age. The first standards are to be completed by the summer, and will cover German, English, math, French, biology and physics. In German reading comprehension, for instance, a student would achieve the minimum level if he or she could understand a simple text. A student who could read between the lines would be ranked at the highest level.

The officials made their decision as they continued to explore the causes of the country's weak performance on an international test known as the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). Fifteen-year-old students in Germany ranked 25th out of 32 countries in overall reading, mathematics and scientific literacy on the tests conducted in 2000.

Help for foreign students planned

The analysis of the test results also showed that the schools, whose student bodies have more than 20 percent foreign children, experience a considerable drop in performance.

Rainer Rajewski, an elementary school teacher in Berlin, has a class with 80 percent foreign pupils. That means that his classes often turn into basic lessons in the German language. "When I have a sentence like 'the duck swims to the bank and disappears into the bushes,' you have to explain the word 'bank' and 'bushes' because they are foreign words to the children," Rajewski said.

The officials said they would push for foreign children to receive more individual attention and work to introduce programs aimed at improving the integration of these children in the schools.