A new class of education

A new class of education

Schools in the poorest boroughs are being transformed as Germany's three-tier educational system is restructured

 Article history

German school
Germany's Hauptschulen and Realschulen have been merged. Photograph: Tobias Schwarz/Reuters

There used to be two synonyms for "social degeneration" in Germany that almost everyone had heard of, Neukölln and Rütli. Neukölln is the poorest borough in Berlin, where more people live on benefits than on their own income and where drug dealers took over the biggest local park as the police helplessly watched. Roughly 150,000 people live here, squeezed together like sardines in 110-year-old Wilhelminian buildings. More than two thirds of them hail from immigrant families.

In the middle of the chaotic streets is the Rütli school. Until spring 2006, it was just one of many neglected schools in Neukölln, before its teachers wrote an open letter to the capital's newspapers demanding the school's closure. They were scared to stand before their classes, they wrote. Suddenly, the nation's eyes were on Neukölln, and its violence, lack of prospects and frustration were revealed to all. What the country saw was the failure of an illusion: that until then the whole German school system was, worldwide, almost second-to-none.

The chimera of the German education system can be summed up in a sentence: it helps weak and strong pupils if they are