School without grades? Is the? That works, says the union and supports the relaunch of a model project. Others are less convinced.
Stuttgart (dpa / lsw) - Four years of primary school without grades, that's nothing new in Baden-Württemberg. However, the country's model project, which has been launched again, is definitely seen as a new reform project. After the announcement by Minister of Education Theresa Schopper (Greens), others did not spare criticism.
According to the plans of the Ministry of Education, boys and girls in 39 schools from the first to the fourth grade are no longer to be graded from the coming school year. "In the end we want to compare the quality of the teaching and the performance of the students," said the minister to the "Stuttgarter Zeitung" and the "Stuttgarter Nachrichten" (Monday).
Such a test run had already been agreed in the Green-Black coalition agreement. But the idea is not new: there was already such a pilot project in the south-west almost ten years ago. In the 2013/2014 school year, ten primary schools took part in the "Primary schools without grades" project. In 2017, Schopper's predecessor Susanne Eisenmann (CDU) announced the end of the project.
Schopper justifies the new attempt with the phenomenon of "bulimic learning". It will be crammed for the test, then everything will be forgotten again. "This does not achieve an educational goal, and I don't understand that by quality," the minister told the two newspapers. The main aim of the project is to enable more social justice.
Schools had successfully "implemented alternative forms of performance measurement and feedback" before Eisenmann stopped them, said Monika Stein, state chairwoman of the Education and Science Union (GEW), on Monday. Parents and teachers were convinced that children would have benefited. The new school experiment shows that there are other ways of measuring performance and giving students and their parents feedback without grades. The "primary school without grades" will ensure that fewer children are lost, "because their eagerness to learn is slowed down by poor grades," said Stein.
The FDP is not so convinced: "Anyone who thinks that children are doing something good by removing hurdles from schools is wrong," said FDP education expert Timm Kern. Primary schools are about acquiring basic skills and not learning them by heart. For the "experiment" children would have to serve with their educational biographies.
The SPD criticized that Schopper's project was by no means an innovation. "The realization that the pilot project, which was positively evaluated when it was first carried out, has potential comes far too late," said Katrin Steinhülb-Joos, spokeswoman for school policy for the SPD parliamentary group. She is certain that "alternative learning development talks" can strengthen students.
