As in other federal states, so will soon be in Hesse: teachers at primary schools will earn as much when they start their careers as those at high schools.
The starting salary will be gradually increased from salary group A12 to A13 and thus by around 600 euros.
Prime Minister Boris Rhein and Minister of Education Alexander Lorz announced this.
In the year of the state elections, it is an election gift that the CDU is making to a not inconsiderably large group on behalf of its coalition partner, the Greens.
And it shows how much the circumstances have changed in a society in which a job is considered underpaid, for which it was long said that the remuneration was in very reasonable proportion to its requirements and the qualifications of the job holder, better: the holder , because men are the exception at primary schools.
Equal treatment has long been demanded
Why should someone qualified to teach physics to seventh graders get paid more from the start than someone who teaches the alphabet to first graders?
It cannot be that the payment of the teachers is based on the shoe size of the students: With this image, the Education and Training Association has long underlined its demand for equal treatment at the start of a career.
In 2012, the association commissioned an expert opinion to clarify the constitutionality of the different salaries.
In view of the fact that all teacher training courses end with state examinations, the differences can no longer be justified, it was said at the time, regardless of the different training content and standard study periods.
That such reasoning was decisive for the decision of the Hessian state government: uncertain.
One thing is certain: the countries are in competition for personnel.
This does not change the fact that civil servant teachers pay neither into unemployment insurance nor into pension insurance and have considerably more net income than employees with the same basic salary.
Whether this can be financed in the long term remains questionable.