The crash came as a surprise five years ago: Baden-Württemberg’s fourth graders were no longer great, but only average. Then countermeasures were taken in the former education model country – with rather moderate success, as is now evident.
Stuttgart / Berlin (dpa / lsw) – According to a study, fourth graders in the southwest have increasing problems with reading and listening. Almost every fifth child does not meet the minimum standards in German and mathematics. The country slips even further this time after the painful crash in the performance study in 2016. In the ranking of the states, Baden-Württemberg is still only in the middle. Minister of Education Theresa Schopper (Greens) presented the study by the Institute for Quality Development in Education (IQB) on Monday in Berlin.
When it comes to reading, the fourth-graders from Baden-Württemberg are in 9th place, and when it comes to listening, they are only 11th. In both areas, only 57 percent of the children achieve the so-called standard standards, and 20 percent do not meet the minimum standards. When it comes to spelling, the country is still in 3rd place. But here, too, many children are lagging behind: only 47 percent can handle the standard, 28 percent cannot meet the minimum requirements. The country ranks sixth in mathematics – almost 20 percent of girls and boys do not reach the minimum level. The Ministry of Education says that the decline in performance has slowed down somewhat and is not as strong as the national trend.
In fact, Baden-Württemberg is not alone with the problems: Nationwide, fourth graders have fallen behind again in reading, writing and math compared to the last studies. Four years ago, the results of the IQB study caused a real shock in the southwest. At that time, the former educational model state of Baden-Württemberg had slipped from a top position to midfield. The Minister of Education at the time, Susanne Eisenmann (CDU), attested to a “continuous quality problem” in the south-west.
Among other things, Eisenmann reacted by founding two scientific institutes that were to take a close look at the education system in the country. In addition, the basic skills of elementary school students in German and math should be significantly strengthened. Apparently it only helped moderately: Eisenmann’s successor Schopper recently said that it would be alarming if 20 percent of the children no longer had optimal reading performance.
The IQB study was based on tests at almost 1,500 schools throughout Germany with around 27,000 fourth graders between April and August 2021. In Baden-Württemberg, around 90 schools and 1,600 children from the then fourth grade took part. At the time of the tests, the students had had a year of pandemic and therefore months of home schooling. According to the study, Corona could have played a role in the drop in performance. On the other hand, negative trends that had already emerged between 2011 and 2016 continued.
An old problem also reappears in the study – the dependency of educational success on the social status of the parents. In the southwest, for example, reading skills were strongly linked to this. The difference between children from privileged households who own more than 100 books and those from less privileged households is therefore still large.
The study also points out that the proportion of children with a migration background among the fourth graders in Baden-Württemberg is almost 50 percent – this is the highest value among the non-city states. In addition, the proportion of households in which only German is spoken as a family language is 53.6 percent in the southwest. This has decreased significantly compared to the study in 2016.
The conclusion of the IQB analysis therefore states that language support continues to be a particular challenge. “This must be systematically developed to ensure that children who come into the education system with little knowledge of German can also go through it successfully.”
