Veröffentlicht am 21.06.14

Quality management by marking schemes dumping

Competence to compensate incompetence conceals the failure of school reforms

It has long been all over town: The methods of alleged “quality management” in education do not lead to greater knowledge
and skills, rather they conceal the fact that students know less and are capable of less. Ever more beginners, particularly in the natural sciences, lack basic knowledge and skills to successfully take up and complete their studies. However, the kind of trouble caused by ministerial guidelines which teacher teams are facing and let out only behind closed doors, is something the public must know about. How knowledge and skills develop as the basis of real education and how this can be achieved best during lessons, has been well-known for a long time. Why are teachers not given the freedom to take independent decisions how to organize their lessons according to their professional training? After all, they are the experts.

Performance explosion by competence orientation – a bluff package ?

Since the “PISA shock” politicians and their advisers from the field of empirical educational research claim that quality of teaching could be improved and a better PISA ranking be achieved only by educational standards, competency-based lessons, core curricula, comparative studies and central exams up to central high-school graduation. The logic behind this standardization is simple and not completely wrong. One is looking for a binding standard to measure the dubious status of skills and knowledge of students. May we believe the advocates of these concepts and the supporting press who claim that within a short time an increase in the high-school graduation rate has been achieved and the rate of failing students has been brought down to almost zero, the number of school dropouts, has been reduced underachieving students have been better promoted and their level of performance has been raised; the ability for studying has improved while getting rid of unnecessary knowledge ballast! For year after year the number of high school graduates with the dream grade of 1.0 (or better) rose while failure rates declined against zero. Who feels like grumbling? Peculiar though, the voices of crafts, SMEs and universities do not stop complaining about the lack and further decline of the quality level of school-graduates. Engineers and students of the natural sciences have become scarce and craft apprentices that are ready to learn and let themselves be trained are urgently searched for. Are these merely the complaints of the diehards and dissatisfied? Or what is happening ?

The complete article as PDF: H.P. Klein: Quality management by marking schemes dumping