As it is well known, among the countries in the world, “Germany is thought to have a very rigid form of explicit school tracking”, and this tracking structure divides students
into three different tracks of secondary schools after 4th grade of primary school, and each track eventually leads to a very different kind of school-leaving certificate (Becker et al., 2016). German traditional three-tier secondary system can date back to the school structure in the 19th century, which differentiated itself between a lower track leading to practical or vocational training in craftsmanship and manual labor, and a higher track towards academic profession, but only in the 1950s “the ideas and image of the prototypical German three-tier system were refined” (Becker et al., 2016).
But very soon “Picht’s (1964) seminal works in the 1960s and the diagnosis of an educational catastrophe prompted a debate about social distributional justice and permeability of the German school system and called into question the functionality of the three-tier structure” (Becker et al., 2016). That debate led to “the introduction of a Gesamtschule, a comprehensive school type comprising all ability levels… with the aim of abandoning the traditional three-tier system”, unfortunately, it did not take the place of the three-tier system as it’s expected, but became ‘a fourth school track’ in the late 1960s and 1970s (Becker et al., 2016).
Germany is a country with a federal system, and the educational and cultural matters are devolved to the state parliaments, so every state of Germany “plays the leading role in the organization, administration and control of schools and other educational institutions”, which’s confirmed by ‘the Basic Law of 1949’ that the school system is under the supervision of each state (Phillips, 1995, p. 47). However, the autonomy the states have doesn’t mean that they can deviate too far from what the education system should deliver, and “there are also federal planning and policy bodies… being the most obvious for the co-ordination of policy for the period of compulsory schooling”
(Phillips, 1995, p. 4).
Due to this traditional regional sovereignty in Germany, every state has a large measure of autonomy in organizing its school system and the training of the teachers (Jones, 2000; Becker et al., 2016), and there has never been one German centralized education system or national curriculum in the context of German whole country, curriculum guidelines and teaching plan are also published on a local basis (Phillips, 1995, p. 63).
School types are also different from state to state, and “students at the end of primary education are confronted with very different options depending on their state of residence”, since the reform of school structures has never stopped (Becker et al., 2016).
In recent years, another big discussion on school tracking has focused especially on the maintenance of the Hauptschule, “as a result, de-tracking reforms have taken place in several states, …the low-track Hauptschule remains only in four states and the intermediate Realschule in five states. Additionally, the comprehensive schools that emerged from the structural reforms in the 1970s” continue to exist in eight states, throughout the whole country there are 17 different school types in the 16 states of Germany (Becker et al., 2016). In common, “the majority of the German states have now adopted a ‘two-paths’ model, which mainly consists of the Gymnasium as the academic track, principally providing access to university training, and a second school type that also opens the path to university training but does not primarily serve this purpose” (Becker et al., 2016).
Comparatively, Baden-Wuerttemberg, a ‘conservative governed state’, still adheres to the traditional tripartite school system and the teacher training is also “structured into three distinct pathways, each of which has its own training programme, administration and examination procedures” (Jones, 2000). Therefore, here in Baden-Wuerttemberg it’s possible to find the traditional three separate types of secondary school, a diversification of the school provision based on the “belief that all pupils fall into one of three psychological or mental categories: the academic, the technical and the practical, each category being best served by a distinctive curriculum in an appropriate type of school” (Phillips, 1995, p. 67).
The first type of school is the Gymnasium – Grade 5 to 12/13, the grammar school providing students with an academic curriculum to prepare them for higher education, and the final school-leaving examination (the Abitur) grants students the right to the university study. The second type of school is the Realschule – Grade 5 to 10, an intermediate school delivering essential education with a ‘semi-academic’ vocational curriculum on administrative and commercial areas to prepare students for a range of technical and middle-management careers with the intermediate school-leaving certificate (the Mittlerer Schulabschluss), not aiming specifically at university education.
The third type of school is the Hauptschule – Grade 5 to 9, which provides a slow-paced and vocationally oriented curriculum with the lowest school leaving-certificate (Hauptschulabschluss) to qualify students for manual labor apprenticeships (Phillips, 1995, p. 4; Becker et al., 2016).
Children in Germany start school at the age of 6 and have 10 years of compulsory education. After 4-year primary school, children will attend one of three tracks of secondary school “on the basis of grades in the primary school and parental choices” as well (Phillips, 1995, p. 178). In the former time, it were teachers that decided which track of school a student would go, if students wanted or the parents wanted their children to go to another school, they must take a test, and if they couldn’t pass the test, they would not be allowed to get in, but now the “parents retain the right of choice even if all advice is directed against them” (Phillips, 1995, p. 69). That “has led to relatively high participation in academic-track schools and has prompted a dramatic change in the distribution of students: even where the lower track school still exists, it usually only caters to a minority of 5 to 20% of the student body,…the once very exclusive Gymnasium now represents the main school” (Becker et al., 2016).
Even though the school “track assignment in Germany is largely based on (students’) achievement, but beyond achievement, social class and also ethnicity also play a role in these transition processes”, which is not negligible in the angle of the reality (Becker, et al., 2016). The PISA study (Program for International Student Assessment) 2000 and 2003 have also yielded some evidence that, among all countries in PISA, “Germany is the country where the individual background has the largest impact on a child's educational achievement” (Jürges & Schneider, 2007), and “the correlation of a child’s track choice with parental background is comparatively strong in Germany” (Kempkes, 2009).
Generally “the first two years following the primary phase are regarded as an observation period during which there is a continuing assessment of whether students have been placed in a school that is suited to their ability” (Phillips, 1995, p. 178), then there are some students who could have to transfer to another type of school. In theory, changing schools between different tracks is possible and desirable, but actually students’ between-track mobility is low and usually downward, that is to say, usually
“they leave the more academically oriented tracks, due to insufficient achievement, and join the more vocationally oriented tracks” (Becker et al., 2016), like from the Gymnasium to the Realschule or from the Realschule to the Hauptschule, and this is believed again that mobility has a socially selective component (Jürges & Schneider, 2007).
Traditionally in Germany the schools are half-day, and in the majority of German schools, lessons end at lunchtime and children leave school around 1 p.m., but now some schools add 2-3 afternoon school per week till 3-4 p.m. to let students do their homework or some activities at school (Freitag & Schlicht, 2009; Frankenberg et al., 2013). Student assessment in German schools uses 6-point scale “with grades 1-4 representing satisfactory attainments”, and students may have “only one average of 5 in their end-of-year report; a 6, or more than two 5s, will in most cases result in their not being able to proceed to the next class”, and a class can only be repeated once, thereafter, those who fail to reach the goals will have to transfer to a lower track of school (Phillips, 1995, p. 5).
Because of the three different tracks of schools leading to very different ends, and also the fact that students rarely move between tracks after being allocated to one of the three secondary school tracks, for German children, “track choice at the age of 10 usually has a strong implication for the entire life course” (Kemptner et al., 2010). In other words, the segregation at the age of ten determines “the whole of a person’s future schooling and career” (Hahn, 1998, p. 115), which has been widely questioned that it is too early to see a child’s competence on learning or to decide a child’s future. It is also true that the different school-leaving certificates still do greatly determine children’s future occupational or professional options and are prerequisites for almost all professions (Phillips, 1995, p. 72; Becker et al., 2016).
On account of the demographic change in a trend of decreasing population of children mainly in rural areas of Germany, the low population density has made the maintenance of the three-tier system unsuitable and less attractive, especially due to “the devaluation of the leaving certificate of Hauptschule in the training market and the preference of parents for other types of schools” (Phillips, 1995, p. 178), the popularity of the Hauptschule among parents has been in sharp decline, which was designed as the main type of secondary school, but now are called as ‘unenviable label of sink school’, or
‘school for the leftovers’ (Phillips, 1995, p. 178; Becker et al., 2016). Therefore, now in Baden-Württemberg many schools of the Hauptschule cannot see enough students and are to be closed or go together with Realschule to become a new kind of school named Gemeinschaftschule (community school).
In Baden-Württemberg, the school system offers students many different ways to get the Abitur in the end for the access to higher education, no matter they start from the Realschule or Hauptschule. There is, for example, Technikgymnasium (technical Gymnasium) or Wirtschaftsgymnasium (economic Gymnasium), which is kind of worker’s Abitur that needs 3 years of study in part-time, not 2 intensive years in the general humanistic Gymnasium, and with this Abitur, students can also go to universities to learn what they want except medicine and theology for example.
Generally speaking, Abitur is a stepping-stone to the university, like the Chinese Gaokao, the National College Entrance Examination, without Abitur it’s impossible for children to go to university for the further study.
Frankly speaking, “the vertical segregation of teacher training in Germany reflects a profound belief in specialisation by differentiation” (Jones, 2000), and there are specially trained teachers for every type of school, for example, according to Jones (2000), “to become a teacher in a Hauptschule, 3-4 years of study at a teacher training college or university are required. A specialist approach to the study of two to three subjects (4-5 and 5-6 years respectively) is required for teaching at the Realschule and Gymnasium”. Also, “the content of each training programme is planned and structured in accordance with the different academic and pedagogical qualities and the varying depths of subject knowledge required by teachers in each of the three types of school”
(Jones, 2000).
Normally to become a teacher in Germany there are some steps to go in general: after obtaining an Abitur, students can decide “to become a teacher from the beginning of their tertiary education”; after earning a Bachelor’s degree, they go on with a Masters’
program “which teaches them two school subjects” in a “domain-specific subject-matter education” and also “courses in education, pedagogy, didactics”, etc.; “after completing their Masters degree (instead of the former first national exam), graduates enter a compulsory teacher training program” as trainee teacher, “which ranges from 12–18 months, depending on the 16 differing German States’ educational requirements”; with completion of this program, it is “finalized by the second German State exam”, which
“leads to full qualification as a secondary school teacher” having lifetime employment as civil officer (Al-Amoush et al., 2014).
In every state, the Department of Education (Kultusministerium) “is in charge of the curriculum framework for each training route” within the tripartite education system, while the teacher training centers (Lehrerseminare) “are responsible for the delivery of the training program and assessment” (Jones, 2000). “Partnership schools provide the practical experience and support in the training of teachers”, and the local education authority (Oberschulamt) “is the administrative body concerned with entry requirements, conditions of service, employment contract”, while the examination board (Pruefungsamt) takes care of the “examination procedures and administration”
(Jones, 2000).
In Germany, “German teachers are protected by the Basic Law in their right freely to express and to disseminate their opinion and to exercise the traditional freedom of teaching”, and “in all states, teachers are seen as independent, autonomous professionals, who are responsible for their instruction” and teaching means (Rust &
Rust, 1995, p.29-30). Comparatively, “German teachers also experienced somewhat lower levels of stress and higher levels of job satisfaction” (Rust & Rust, 1995, p. 91), one of the main reasons is the high salary of the German teachers, which has been shown in the comparative data that German teachers are among the highest paid in the world, their salaries “are more than double the industrial worker average” (Rust & Rust, 1995, p. 29).