PISA – The next crisis!
The youth is not good enough for the nation’s demands.
Once again the nation faces ruin
Germany’s first PISA results, back in 2001, were already bad. The tests showed real deficits in pupils’ competencies. What they did not show was an impending national catastrophe. Politically, a “PISA shock”, an “educational catastrophe” and an “educational state of emergency” were proclaimed all the same – and with that the urgency of far-reaching reforms was established. So what was coming had been announced. Reforms duly followed: schools were committed more firmly to standards, comparison and measurable results, and German PISA scores improved for a while. None of this confirms the catastrophe narrative of the time. The national crisis was never a PISA measurement. It was a political reading of the finding.
Because what PISA does is test fifteen-year-olds on standardised tasks. In 2026 the focus was on science, together with mathematics and reading. In Germany 6,659 pupils at 246 schools took part; the sample represents some 718,000 fifteen-year-olds. And what follows from the tests is, first of all, that the measured performance really is poor. Around 34 per cent fail to reach proficiency level 2 in mathematics, around 32 per cent in reading, around 27 per cent in science. That is the finding. That a “decline of the education nation” therefore looms follows from it just as little as the claim that migration, digitalisation or too little pressure to perform caused the results.
Even the popular story of an international collapse needs explaining. Germany does reach its own lowest PISA scores to date in 2026, but in mathematics, reading and science it still sits close to the OECD average in each case. At the same time the OECD averages themselves have fallen to historic lows. So the finding, to begin with, reads: the fifteen-year-olds tested in Germany do considerably worse on these tasks, on average, than earlier German PISA cohorts. Everything beyond that has to be explained.
Two PISA tests, twenty-five years apart, the same pattern: the tests show poor performance. Politics turns that into a national crisis. In 2001 the formulas were “PISA shock”, “educational catastrophe” and “educational state of emergency”. In 2026 Education Minister Prien calls the new results “dramatic”, the federal government and the Länder demand a “reversal of the trend” and declare: we have a plan, now it has to be implemented – and the chancellor, here too, calls for “a major effort”. PISA supplies measurements. The finding only becomes a national crisis through their political processing. Which makes a different question worth asking: what exactly turns poor pupil performance, in this debate, into a problem for Germany straight away? And: what is school actually supposed to accomplish for this society?
A scandal!
What PISA shows, first of all, is something fairly solid: a considerable share of fifteen-year-olds in Germany does not reliably reach the minimum standards PISA sets, after roughly nine years of school. Many cannot work out what a text says, do not handle simple mathematical relations reliably, and struggle with scientific tasks. That is a real problem – first of all and above all for the young people themselves. Because if, after years of compulsory schooling, young people have been unable to acquire quite basic competencies, an obvious question arises: why were these not taught to them in nearly nine years of school?
Beyond that, the link between scientific competence and socio-economic status is stronger than ever before. The damage described above therefore hits hardest those who already arrive at school with worse starting conditions. All of these young people spent some nine years in the state school, where the right to education is enforced in practice as compulsory schooling. The entire next generation in this country is obliged to prove itself in a competition over learning and performance. From day one, pupils are observed with an eye to testing, assessed, and finally graded and sorted. One part qualifies for further education; another is excluded from it. This hits precisely those pupils who have difficulties learning and who, for that very reason, would actually need more education. They enter the competition for correspondingly worse educational, vocational and occupational paths with low leaving certificates. And school makes this sorting appear legitimate.
The obvious PISA scandal would surely be that some pupils are worked on in school for years and still leave it with deficient basic competencies. And that, first of all, to the pupils’ own detriment. The public debate shifts the damage: suddenly it is no longer primarily about the young people who read, calculate or think scientifically badly. It is about Germany, about the country as a business location, about skilled workers and about international competition – about whether the next generation is up to the demands to come. With that, the yardstick has been shifted. What is scandalised is that this result is no good for Germany. That education’s losers are produced along the way is not the scandal in this debate. They are merely supposed to be not quite so bad.
The public debate supplies ample material for this shift. The Bavarian business association puts it particularly openly: “For the competitiveness of our business location we urgently depend on well-qualified young skilled workers and graduates.” The next generation is “the most valuable thing we have as a country poor in raw materials”; results like these are something one “simply cannot afford”.[1] With that the yardstick is spoken aloud: pupils and their qualifications appear as a resource of the business location. Education Minister Prien, too, reads the results on ZDFheute as untapped German potential: “We are failing, in the lower performance segment as much as in the upper one, to do justice to the potential of our pupils.”[2] So it is not only about the fact that many young people, after years of school, do not securely command basic competencies. It is at the same time about too many dropping out at the bottom and too little excellence emerging at the top. When North Rhine-Westphalia’s education minister Feller declares the results to be “alarmingly weak for Germany” and says Germany is now internationally “only mid-table”,[3] then the standard of comparison is clear as well: not education as such, but the national claim to a place near the front.
Out of the measurements a national story of decline is made. Germany is “slipping further”, ZDFheute reports; “twenty-five years after the first PISA shock”, things are going “further downhill” for Germany’s pupils[4]. The association of Hessian employers’ federations speaks of an “alarm signal in education policy and in economic terms”.[5] Poor pupil performance thus appears as the harbinger of damage to come: the next generation seems not capable enough for the nation’s present and future demands. Its insufficient qualification counts as a danger to Germany’s standing in international competition. This is exactly where the debate shifts. It criticises school not from the standpoint of the pupils who are harmed, but from the standpoint of national usability. The scandal then consists not in young people standing there with deficient basic competencies after years of compulsory schooling, but in school evidently failing to deliver the next generation that Germany needs.
“Education for all” – what exactly does that mean?
In this country, everyone has to go to school in the first place. That counts as a great democratic promise: education is not to be a private matter for families, not to depend on the parents’ wallet, and not to be open only to the already privileged. The state organises general compulsory schooling in the form of shared curricula, provides the corresponding teaching materials and issues the next generation – in line with its qualification – with report cards and leaving certificates. In this form school appears as a state institution that opens access to education for the entire next generation of the country.
The peculiarity of the promise of “education for all” begins where general education is at the same time organised as a competition over performance. Everyone is supposed to learn, but not simply for as long as it takes them to grasp the various subject matters. Everyone receives instruction, but at the same time levels and progress of learning are tested, judged, measured against a particular yardstick and finally assessed. This assessment makes the results comparable with one another. Everyone equally has a right to education – and this right is carried out in practice in an institution that continuously establishes who meets the prescribed performance requirements and to what degree. A difference in learning level becomes a difference in performance; performance becomes a grade; grades become leaving certificates; and attached to those certificates are entitlements of differing reach, which decisively determine the chances of various occupations with very different incomes.
With that, “education for all” is at the same time the precondition for a pre-sorting of the next generation carried out by school. Precisely because the entire next generation has to pass through the same state institution, it can be observed, tested and prepared for different further paths according to uniform standards. In doing so, school does not simply give everyone “their place”. A leaving certificate does not fix an occupation, and there is no central office that distributes the cohort afterwards: 30 per cent to university, 40 per cent to vocational training, the rest that way please. Training firms choose for themselves, universities have admission requirements, employers hire. But school has already narrowed the range of places for which someone can later compete at all.
That is school’s particular achievement for this society: it qualifies the next generation and at the same time pre-sorts it. It imparts knowledge and abilities – and translates different performances into educational entitlements of differing reach. In the end, therefore, pupils leave school not only with different qualifications and different knowledge. They also leave it with different rights of access to what comes next. And because these differences came about through individual performance, the chances and restrictions that follow appear as a deserved outcome: I made it. Or else: I wasn’t good enough.
School imparts knowledge and abilities. At the same time it does not simply work on the principle that everyone is given enough time to grasp the matter at hand. There are fixed timetables, school years, class tests, examinations, report cards and transitions. Within this system all pupils have to prove themselves alike. A provisional level of learning thereby acquires a second function. The observation that at a given moment someone cannot yet do something becomes a judgement of performance – and in many cases that judgement has the consequence that access to further education remains closed.
Of course a society must be able to check whether someone possesses particular knowledge. Nobody disputes the point of factual performance requirements. But it does not follow automatically that the entire educational path has to be organised as a sequence of continuous performance assessments – and still less that these assessments have to decide how much further education someone receives. Precisely for pupils with learning difficulties this creates a peculiar situation: whoever would need more learning first receives a worse assessment for not yet commanding the material sufficiently. And that poor assessment can subsequently restrict further educational opportunities.
More personal responsibility
The insidious side of this construction is that the basis of the assessment, the performance delivered, really is one’s own. The pupil studied or did not study, understood the task or did not understand it, passed the class test himself or did not. That is exactly why the result appears in the end as his own. Whoever advances has made it. Whoever does not advance is not good enough.
Even when pupils keep finding good reasons for their failure – that there was not enough time to study, say, or that the teacher explained badly, or that the lessons are not designed for the individual peculiarity of one’s own brain (neurodiversity, as the keyword goes) – the result is to be attributed to the pupils, because it came about through their actual performance. That is precisely where school’s particular achievement lies: an institutionally organised distribution of different possibilities appears as the outcome of individual effort, talent, or else a lack of performance.
This also explains why school does not merely enforce its judgements as external compulsion, but suggests them to pupils as a relation to themselves. The finding that someone cannot solve a maths problem turns into the verdict: “I’m no good at maths.” The outcome of not having obtained a leaving certificate turns into the verdict: “That’s not for me, then.” A restriction organised by school turns into a judgement about one’s own person. So school does not only sort. It supplies the matching legitimation along with it, for why this sorting appears just and deserved.
“You are good enough”
It is at exactly this point that a certain kind of pedagogical consolation acquires its unintended comedy. After a botched test, a little sticker might be stuck next to the grade: “You are good enough.” That may well be kindly meant; the inadequate mark stays standing beside it – and counts. So the institutional message runs at the same time: for this requirement your performance was precisely not good enough. The sticker changes nothing about that. It neither explains the material not yet understood nor creates additional time to learn. Nor does it annul the assessment. The consolation arrives alongside. That is exactly where the sarcasm of this pedagogical formula of comfort lies. The grade did not simply inform the pupil about a level of learning. It gave his performance a value – and that value comes out badly. Because this performance counts as his own, more hangs on the grade straight away than the individual task: a performance judged deficient turns into the verdict “I am not good enough.” The sticker does not contradict this verdict in practice. It does not annul it. It merely sets a second message beside it: despite the devaluation you are to regard yourself as unconditionally valuable and to step up again.
What this shows is not only the silliness but also the inverted logic of resilience education. The damage that school competition does to pupils’ relation to themselves is not criticised but worked on psychologically. Pupils are to learn to endure setbacks, not to let themselves be discouraged, to get up again and simply to work on themselves more next time. Defeat becomes not a reason to call the procedure into question but an instruction to stabilise oneself. The desired conclusion is not: what kind of institution is this that assesses and sorts me like that? But: I have to become more resilient.
That does not mean encouragement is a bad thing. Of course a child may need reassurance – especially when school regularly certifies failure to it. But this reassurance remains contradictory as long as it stands next to a judgement that counts in practice. The sticker says: you are good enough. The grade says: for this requirement you were not. And in case of doubt only the grade decides on the report card, the transition and the entitlement. One can deliver the judgement very empathetically. It remains a judgement.
The reforms of the 2000s: measure more, compare more.
When PISA measures poor results, it does not stop at the observation that a lot of pupils have not learned something. The political reaction comes immediately: school must be better steered, better monitored, better supported, committed more firmly to results. That is how it was after 2001, and that is how it is again now. In doing so the political reaction presupposes what school is supposed to accomplish: it is to qualify the next generation, to make performance comparable and, by means of leaving certificates, to prepare pupils for different further educational and occupational paths. What was reformed, then, was not this purpose but the way school is to fulfil this task more reliably and more successfully.
After PISA 2000 the Standing Conference of the Länder education ministers resolved on central fields of action: earlier language support, support for disadvantaged pupils, all-day schooling, better diagnostic skills among teachers – but also binding educational standards and “results-oriented evaluation”. In the years that followed, nationwide educational standards were introduced, the IQB was founded and an extensive system of educational monitoring was built up. The conference itself spoke of a paradigm shift towards results orientation, accountability and system monitoring. School was thus to be organised more strongly from the desired result backwards: what should pupils be able to do at particular points in time? How can it be measured whether they can? And who is responsible if they cannot?
At first that sounds reasonable enough. Anyone who wants to know whether teaching works does, after all, have to check what comes out of it. And when many pupils fail to reach basic competencies, the call for standards, diagnostics, support and monitoring suggests itself. This reform logic aims at bringing more pupils up to the requirements that have been set and at making levels of performance more precisely visible. It asks how more pupils can reach the expected competencies. In doing so it remains presupposed that these competencies are assessed, compared and translated into leaving certificates. It wants to improve the output within a school whose results continue to count for transitions, certificates and entitlements.
An educational standard could be harmless taken on its own. If all pupils are supposed to have understood fractions by the end of year six, that is at first only a shared learning objective. In theory all of them could reach this objective. As a learning objective, all of them could succeed. As a yardstick of assessment within a system of entitlements, by contrast, success works relatively: whoever advances advances further than others. As soon as the shared standard becomes the yardstick of assessment, the differences established feed into grades, transition decisions and leaving certificates. Then the standard does not only show where there is a need to learn. It helps decide who is subsequently allowed to go where.
That is exactly why more support does not abolish the sorting. If a child can read better afterwards, that is a real gain. If disadvantaged pupils receive more support, that is better than no support. All-day schooling can make additional learning time possible, more individual learning paths can make sense, good diagnostics can help teachers recognise problems earlier. So the criticism is not: support is pointless. Support can work on learning problems. But it changes nothing about the fact that better-supported pupils, too, are assessed afterwards and that these assessments feed into certificates, transitions and further educational paths.
So one can give better support and go on sorting at the same time. That is no contradiction. A selective school system, after all, does not need pupils who are as bad as possible. It needs usable pupils at different levels of performance. That is precisely the logic of the PISA reforms: the lower part is not to fall so far behind that it is inadequately equipped for training, work and everyday life. The upper part is to become more capable. In between, differences, assessments, certificates and entitlements remain in place. The connection between performance, assessment and entitlement remains presupposed throughout. What was reformed is how performance is produced, measured, compared and steered.
“Performance must pay off again”
Here it also becomes comprehensible why the formula so popular at present, “performance must pay off again”, sounds strangely familiar within the education system. In the school system here, performance really does pay off: better assessments generally open up certificates of greater reach and with them additional educational paths. The interesting point is only this: that advantage is relative. It works as an advantage precisely because not everyone has it.
The promise of performance is necessarily relative. For the value of a leaving certificate does not consist only in certifying knowledge that is there. It consists also in which possibilities this certificate opens up in relation to others. This can be observed nicely in the regularly recurring debate about supposedly “devalued” Abitur results. When a lot of very good Abitur grades are awarded, warnings about “grade inflation”[6] and a devaluation of the qualification follow quickly. That is revealing. If the sole purpose of a certificate consisted in attesting existing knowledge, a large number of very good graduates would be, to begin with, a pleasing thing. A “devaluation” only makes sense once the certificate is additionally meant to distinguish. The good certificate then attests not merely: you can do a lot. But at the same time: you have possibilities that others do not have.
That is exactly where the logic of the current reform debate shows itself as well. It is not only about stabilising the lower performance range. It is also about producing more excellence at the top again and about the graduation of performance working better. That is no criticism of school sorting but its modernisation programme: distribution according to performance is to stay, but it is to deliver better results.
More work. More performance.
At the latest here, PISA regularly ends up at the labour market. The federal government itself makes the connection. Poor basic competencies are treated not only as a problem for pupils but as a problem for vocational training, employment, demographic change and the demand for skilled workers. But the term “skilled-labour shortage”, too, deserves more precision than it usually gets. In a recent analysis the Federal Employment Agency identifies bottlenecks in particular occupational groups – in care, health, construction, the trades or early-years education, for instance.[7] At the same time it explicitly records: there is no evidence of a general shortage of labour. The training market, too, presents an irritating picture: there are unfilled training places and at the same time applicants without a training place. So the problem is not simply that Germany has too few people. There are concrete bottlenecks in particular activities, qualifications, regions and requirements. Society’s need is sorted. And that is exactly where school qualification acquires its significance.
The society that school prepares people for does not consist of positions of the same kind. The activities differ. The qualification requirements differ. And incomes, working conditions, security and social possibilities differ considerably as well. School does not produce this social hierarchy. But it hands the next generation over to it with different qualifications and different entitlements. That is why the formula “more education” does not simply dissolve this hierarchy either. A low-paid activity is not paid better because the person performing it learned more at school. And if everyone had the Abitur tomorrow, that would not automatically produce a well-paid academic job for everyone. More education can improve the life of every individual. But it does not automatically produce more well-equipped social positions. Those are two different questions.
A brief glance sideways at the social reforms makes the same yardstick visible in less pedagogical language. What is still to be developed in the next generation is already available in adults: labour power. There the message is put far more directly: whoever can work is to put their labour power to use. As comprehensively as possible. Preferably in such a way that state support is no longer necessary. In the new basic income support scheme it is explicitly laid down that claimants capable of work are to deploy their labour power “to the maximum extent that can reasonably be expected”[8] until the need for assistance has been fully overcome. With pupils the same logic sounds friendlier: develop potential. Secure basic competencies. Strengthen peak performance. Make something of yourself. That is not the same thing. School is not a job centre. Lessons are not basic income support. But in both cases a social need is formulated as the task of the individual. The adult is to deploy their labour power. The pupil is first of all to develop it. That is precisely why the PISA debate arrives so quickly at skilled workers, the business location and the national future. Pupils appear not only as learners. They appear above all as future bearers of labour power whose quality matters for Germany.
What is actually being scandalised about PISA?
PISA 2026 shows real deficits in performance: many young people do not securely command basic competencies after a long period of compulsory schooling. That is neither to be played down nor to be dealt with by pointing out that other countries have problems as well. But this finding is a long way from leading to what the political and public debate makes of it. Those diagnoses rather skip a decisive question: how and to what end does learning take place in school? Analysis of the matter itself is passed over entirely – instead, poor performance is interpreted directly as an educational emergency which functions as part of a national story of decline. Suitable causes for the decline are then offered – from which, in turn, the suitable reforms can seemingly be derived with necessity. The PISA finding itself accomplishes none of this.
PISA makes visible what fifteen-year-olds can do in the areas tested in each case – and what many still cannot do after years of schooling. That is, to begin with, a real problem – above all for the pupils themselves. It becomes a political PISA alarm once these deficits count at the same time as a deficiency in the qualification of the next generation. School is supposed to prepare this next generation for different educational, vocational and occupational paths. In doing so it does not only qualify: it assesses performance and attaches to it certificates and entitlements of differing reach. The reform answer runs: more support, stronger differentiation, individualised learning paths and stronger peak performance. That can improve teaching and learning outcomes. The connection between performance, assessment and entitlement remains in place throughout. The reforms aim at making school more capable for this task; its sorting function is presupposed in the process, not abolished. School is to function better – for precisely this social task.
Sources
[1] vbw-bayern.de/vbw/Themen-und-Services/Bildung/
[2] zdfheute.de/politik/deutschland/pisa-studie-streeck-prien-historisch-schlecht-reaktionen-100.html
[3] land.nrw/pressemitteilung/ministerin-feller-pisa-mahnt-uns-konsequent-weiter-voranzugehen
[4] zdfheute.de/politik/deutschland/pisa-studie-streeck-prien-historisch-schlecht-reaktionen-100.html
[5] vhu.de/themen/bildung/pisa-2025
[6] tagesschau.de/inland/einser-abitur-kritik-100.html
[7] German federal government; Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs 2026, and: Federal Employment Agency, as of August 2026.
[8] German federal government; Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs 2026.
