The impending conference of state education ministers in Berlin has been preceded by a stark warning from the German Association of Teachers of Modern Languages (Deutscher Philologenverband), raising serious concerns about the proposed expansion of data-driven school development and the creation of a “student ID”. The association cautions that these initiatives risk becoming an undue burden on teachers, potentially generating more administrative work without providing tangible benefits for individual students.
Susanne Lin-Klitzing, chair of the Deutscher Philologenverband, emphasized to “Welt” that centralized data collection should not become an end in itself. She argued that data utilization must be inextricably linked to practical and actionable recommendations for targeted student support, ensuring those suggestions directly impact student outcomes. Critically, she stressed the need for state education ministers to clarify the political and legal framework surrounding the planned “student ID” a system intended to store students’ anonymized educational biographies.
The association acknowledges the stated goal of data-driven school development: enhanced student performance within the German education system. However, they contend that state education ministries should not focus solely on accumulating data through an ever-increasing number of performance assessments and learning progress analyses. This approach, they argue, is proving unproductive.
Instead, the Deutscher Philologenverband advocates for a shift towards providing schools with “differentiated, data-minimizing and user-oriented feedback and support formats”. These formats should be directly usable by teachers to facilitate student progress. Importantly, the association insists that state-level education policies must be consistently aligned with the individualized support needs of students, ideally employing empirically developed support programs accessible to teachers. The current trajectory, they suggest, risks prioritizing data collection over genuine pedagogical improvement and potentially alienating the teaching workforce.
