The impact of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) on aspects of education policy reform in Germany

Abstract

The poor performance of German students in PISA 2000 was a wake-up call for Germany, with the students’ scores in reading, mathematics and science being considerably lower than the OECD average. The immediate reaction to the disappointing results, dubbed the German “PISA shock”, stimulated a heated public debate and a strong policy response, with the German government enacting reform measures that led to significant improvement in the country’s educational performance. One of the core elements of the reform was the passage from the German Bildung, which is an education philosophy based on the development of the individual rather than on specific functional abilities, to a notion where educational standards and assessment of students’ achievements are central. Another crucial intervention was to define standards for teacher education, which led to a critical reflection on the quality of teacher training. In this article, we propose to review those measures, while touching upon others, of the German educational reform following the publication of the PISA results.