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Federal Education Minister Anja Karliczek has found her topic: the fight against educational federalism.

“We need a new start in education policy,” said the CDU politician to “Spiegel”.

"The point is that we identify issues that the federal and state governments can tackle better together than each state alone."

It is not Karliczek's first foray.

With the “digital pact”, the federal states were still ready to agree to a restriction of their cultural sovereignty for money from the federal government.

But at the “National Education Council” they bucked.

The federal and state committee should work out proposals for aligning school qualifications.

But Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg were eliminated before the constitutionally problematic council met.

"We only fear a massive deterioration in the education system in Bavaria", raged Markus Söder.

"We want to keep our high-quality Bavarian Abitur and not a central Abitur from Berlin."

Now Karliczek counters: In 2024, when the digital pact expires and the countries need money again, she wants to talk about federalism again: “The subject of digitization is not over then.

Not even the challenges of inclusion, integration and the decoupling of educational success and social origin.

Cooperation in federalism should therefore develop further. "

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Karliczek would of course first have to show how this "further development" could remedy the situation.

Many European countries, smaller than the larger federal states, offer suggestions for this.

Nobody prevents the high-performing, but poorly funded Bavaria and Saxony from learning from Finland;

no one to take the underperforming Brandenburg or Berliners to Denmark or Ireland as an example.

Estonia knows how to go digital.

With educational sovereignty comes educational responsibility.

Nothing against profiling: Karliczek, however, should not release the federal states from their responsibility.

How will the school lessons continue?

One thing is clear: It is unclear how the schools will continue.

Since education is a state matter, it is already clear that on Tuesday at the meeting of the federal and state levels there will be further arguments about the opening of schools.

Source: WELT / Philipp Reichelt