Evidence based indicators for local educational monitoring

Abstract

As has been shown in PISA and PIAAC, the social background has an impact on educational outputs and outcomes in Germany. Efforts made in the last decades have improved the situation, but life circumstances still influence the opportunities of children and adults to develop their educational potentials, and performance gaps still remain. Considerations about developing educational policies to counteract this have focused up to now on educational institutions and kindergarten (early education and care (ECEC)) as well as on specific social groups of individuals. Especially since 2014/15 with a higher number of persons seeking asylum or recognition as refugees in Germany, in political discussions the indicator immigrant background is omnipresent. In 2017, the district government of Berlin-Mitte, a district that is home for 377.985 inhabitants with 179 nationalities, made a decision to initiate the project EduMitte to identify indicators for monitoring the educational processes on the local level covering the education time from ECEC until the end of secondary school. Reasons for this initiative were the special integration policy of the district to discontinue using the term immigrant background in its planning activities due to its negative connotation and the fact that it is only a descriptive and not an explanatory characteristic. Further, the fact that for many years about 11% of the adolescents leave secondary school without a school certificate was seen as a clear political mandate to act. First project results were presented in August 2018, showing for some specific family constellations that the immigrant background does not make a difference in kindergarten attendance years when controlling the results for the education of the family (ISCED level) and the languages(s) spoken at home.