Mhe chairman of the Telekom Foundation, the former state and federal minister Thomas de Maizière (CDU), has made a daring move to the public. He appeals to the Ministers of Education to simply suspend the detailed administrative regulations for schools. The schools were smothered in regulations.
Since, in his view, Germany is faced with the ruins of an education system that is neither capable of reform nor willing to reform it, de Maizière considers only a radical approach to be expedient. He sees the main cause of the school misery in the shared responsibilities between the school supervisory board, the school board and the school management. A good school cannot succeed if many are responsible at the schools themselves, if schools are stifled by regulations and if the working conditions do not allow for any freedom.
The Telekom Foundation therefore sees one way of achieving rapid improvements in the employer capacity of the individual school for the entire staff working for it and its own budget. The school management must be the supervisor for all employees, which the staff also selects themselves.
Less regulations
Depending on requirements, it must also be possible to hire not only trained teachers, but also people with other qualifications, i.e. lateral and lateral entrants, administrative staff, school psychologists, social workers and technical staff. Such multi-professionalism releases resources and is essential for a modern school.
More responsible freedom for the schools means fewer regulations. The local schools should decide on the use of analogue and digital aids such as textbooks or educational offers on the Internet. Textbook commissions etc. should be dropped, and individual aids should be banned by the school supervisory board.
As a corrective for the individual freedom of school management, the transparency of the achieved learning performance should serve: This means that it must be clear whether a school achieves the minimum, standard and optimal standards. So far, there has usually been no consequence if a school does not achieve the so-called educational standards. In the event of problems, there must be opportunities for the school supervisory/inspectorate to intervene, both as feedback and as support.
The example of the Netherlands, with its long tradition of school autonomy for schools and regional school authorities, shows how this can work in practice. “We want every school to make its learning outcomes and the circumstances in which they have achieved their goals public every year,” says the paper, which is signed by de Maizière and the managing director of the Telekom Foundation, Ekkehard Winter. Each school should publish its learning outcomes and the framework conditions for its work annually, which should then be reflected in the education reports of the federal and state governments.
As a third rapid reform step, the foundation proposes a reform of the teachers’ working time models. It is anachronistic that teachers’ working hours have been measured in terms of the teaching load for more than a hundred years. In the current system, time quotas for activities outside of lessons could only be made available via reduction hours. That is absurd, because good school is more than good teaching. Germany needs weekly working hours with attendance rules at school and holidays.
In the medium and long term, a new regulation of working hours will also mean that the teachers’ workplace must be in the school building. In this way, joint lesson development, team teaching, mentoring of career changers and side entrants or internal school training in the sense of professional learning communities would also succeed. It has been proven that traditional teacher training is no longer effective. The Foundation sees the three proposals as an opportunity to quickly and noticeably improve the current education crisis.
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