A fifth of fourth graders in Germany do not even reach the minimum requirements in reading, spelling and mathematics.
At the end of elementary school, these children are deprived of their future.
The right to a minimum education demanded by the Federal Constitutional Court is not redeemed.
Pandemic-related restrictions are only partly responsible for the devastating results; at best, they have reinforced a negative trend since 2016.
It is also not due to a growing proportion of students with a migration background or children from socially disadvantaged and educationally disadvantaged families.
Hamburg has worked its way up
Hamburg is one of the states with a particularly high proportion of such children and has managed to work its way up through consistent performance concentration, mandatory support offers and a focus on the core competencies of reading, writing and arithmetic.
It took a good ten years and isn't over, but it's working.
Bremen and Berlin, and most recently Brandenburg too, are unable to end the home-made educational misery because they either do nothing or get bogged down.
A joint effort by the federal states is now required: an agreement on mandatory language proficiency surveys in kindergarten age, on uniform social indices in all 16 federal states, on support for the weak.
Elementary schools will have to go back to proven exercises: reading aloud, clapping syllables, hyphenating, dictation, matching sounds to specific letters, practicing basic numeracy.
That's what the educational researchers say now, who would have made a fool of themselves ten years ago with such apparently antediluvian educational advice.
Instead of a talent school program based on traffic light concepts, targeted and mandatory support for high-risk students would now be more important.
It's high time to focus on that.