Good morning, dear readers,
it all sounded good. Actually very good. Because a year ago, Bettina Stark-Watzinger (FDP) announced a revolution. The Federal Minister of Education said in the t-online interview: “It is important that we do not quarrel in small-scale discussions, but tackle the big tasks.” So she wants to go to the Conference of Ministers of Education in the future – something that her predecessors had avoided.
That sounded like cooperation, like departure. After that things really move forward when the FDP occupies the Ministry of Education. Everything should get better – that was Stark-Watzinger’s message. A year has passed since then. And this much is clear today: Little has changed, there is hardly any progress. Cooperation with the federal states is faltering.
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The Minister of Education is the focus these days. Stark-Watzinger’s education summit ended yesterday – without concrete results. Her department could send a message to the country: How to speed up important projects if the political will is there. How the young generation is viewed. And that the liberals are finally showing how pragmatic they can govern.
Instead, the ministry is currently a symbol of political inertia.
There is a lot to do: The Pisa studies have had meager results for the Federal Republic for years – the next ones are expected at the end of the year. The differences in educational policy between the federal states become injustices: the average Abitur grades diverge widely. However, the high school graduates use them to apply for the same university places.
The second digital package for schools is set up without an evaluation of the first pact (which was supposed to promote digitization with a lot of money from the federal coffers, but which was hardly used). The expansion of all-day schools was supported, but the funds for ongoing operations were hardly increased. And education in Germany is still extremely dependent on the origin of the parents: Less than 20 percent of school leavers with parents who do not have a high school diploma make it to university.
But the crisis in education policy is currently being reflected particularly well in the energy allowance for students. Stark-Watzinger announced it last September. The idea: Students and technical students should receive 200 euros from the state in order to be able to cushion the consequences of high energy prices. The Federal Statistical Office has calculated that around 40 percent of students are at risk of poverty. In September 2022, as written, the draft was presented.
And since when has the website been activated for applying for benefits? As of yesterday: Wednesday, March 15, 2023. Seven months after the announcement.
Around 3.5 million people are entitled to the 200 euros, nobody has received anything so far. Although: A few thousand of them took part in a test program, and some of the money was already paid out. But that is the only mini-success that Stark-Watzinger has so far achieved in terms of an energy flat rate. “The state doesn’t care about the needs of the students,” writes my colleague Tom Hoops in his comment. At least when it comes to the energy flat rate, one has to say: Stark-Watzinger brutally let the students down.
To ensure that everything gets better in the future, the ministry held an “education summit” on Tuesday and Wednesday. Stark-Watzinger had loaded and previously announced full-bodied that she would establish a “new form and culture of cooperation with everyone involved”. She wanted to set up an “education team” and therefore asked her 16 country colleagues from the ministries of education to do so.
But most waved them off, only two of them showed up: Astrid-Sabine Busse from Berlin and Ties Rabe from Hamburg. The majority of the remaining state ministers let Stark-Watzinger run up. They accused her of insufficient preparation for the summit. The Hessian CDU Minister of Education Alexander Lotz told the industry service “Table Media”: “Neither the date nor the format and content were agreed with us.” On Deutschlandfunk, Stark-Watzinger had explained soothingly that all of this was just the start of a journey, not the end.
This path is currently leading into the unknown. This is too little. Ironically, Ties Rabe, the Hamburg SPD man, said: “The states alone without the impulse of the federal government will not solve the distribution problem.” It was about the federal government’s start-up opportunities program, which could start in 2024 and is intended to support disadvantaged students.
It can hardly be said more clearly: The countries are asking the minister for more leadership. On her own peak.
Naturally: Education policy in Germany is a matter for the federal states. And the individual sovereigns are very reluctant to let Berlin dictate which compulsory reading must be read in the advanced German courses, which math problem must be mastered without a pocket calculator. But the financing framework could be set by Stark-Watzinger. Make money available more easily. Combat teacher shortages with unified incentives. Present viable concepts for equal opportunities.
That could work in the education department. It could really be a departure. A signal to the country: Look here, digitization works here. Instead, education policy is bobbing along. Fragmented in federalism – without the necessary coordination from the federal government.
After the summit, Stark-Watzinger declared that a “task force” made up of federal, state, local authorities and science should start work. But she didn’t say what’s going to get better now. So there is only one thing left for her summit: a missed opportunity.
What’s up?
The term only became really popular during the corona pandemic, The body is now well known: in the afternoon there will be a prime ministers’ conference. This time, however, it is not about advice on a virus, but about the distribution of refugees among the different federal states – and their accommodation. Other topics include energy policy and bottlenecks in the supply of medicines. In the afternoon, Prime Ministers Stephan Weil (SPD) and Hendrik Wüst (CDU) will appear before the press and announce what the sovereigns have agreed on.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz is meeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Berlin today. The talks are supposed to be about cooperation between Germany and Israel. Security policy issues could also be discussed. Netanyahu is under pressure in his home country: there have been large-scale demonstrations in Israel for days against a planned judicial reform.
