Germany is flunking the education test

F ROM MAY 1st, the proud holders of doctorates will no longer be allowed to put the title Dr in front of their name in German passports. For a country obsessed with qualifications—Prof Drs are fairly common and even Dr Drs not so rare—this decline in standing may be hard. But it is not so hard as the decline in German educational standards.

The most recent results from three very different testing regimes, comparing pupils of varied ages, point in a single direction: downwards. The best-known, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests performance in maths, reading and science among 15-year-olds across some 80 countries every three years. Its most recent scores, in December, confirm steep plunges in all three subjects over the past decade in Germany (see chart).

A separate study that measures reading competence among fourth-graders across 65 countries, known by the acronym IGLU, found that 25.4% of the German cohort lacked adequate skills in 2021, up from 18.9% five years earlier and just 17% in 2001. Meanwhile the latest survey of German-language competence among nineth-graders by IQB, an educational-research institute that compares outcomes between German states, found that the proportion nationwide that fail to reach minimum standards in reading, listening and spelling had risen respectively by 9, 16 and 9 percentage points since 2015.

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