With the corona crisis, many new words have found their way into everyday language: no one has to look up incidence, intensive capacities or R-value. In the school sector, the word creations and paraphrases for the new pandemic-related non-normality are particularly diverse: “presence operation”, “restricted regular operation”, “alternate model” or “hybrid teaching”. And meanwhile it is called “homeschooling”, “distance learning” or “distance learning” again. With some parents and students, however, the hairs on the back of their necks stand up when they hear this. There are complaints that there can be no talk of “teaching”.

“Effective teaching looks different.” Sabrina Wetzel, Deputy Chairwoman of the Federal Parents’ Council, reports on emails from parents describing various problems. “Many parents are overwhelmed by supporting their children, school administrators, teachers and students are frustrated because the programs are not yet really running smoothly.” Crashes, poor WiFi, sound and picture failures – “effective lessons look different”, says Wetzel.

Frustration also resonates with Dario Schramm, Secretary General of Federal Schoolchildren Conference. The 20 – year old goes to the 10. Class of an integrated comprehensive school near Cologne. “The federal and state governments now have to take money into their hands and massively expand server capacities. Otherwise these weeks will end in disaster.” For many, everyday school life is currently looking very dreary: Download documents in the morning, edit them and upload them again in the afternoon. “This process is just as terrible as it sounds. The social and communal learning, which should be a core component of education, is currently massively lacking.”

Whether there is feedback and video conferences depends very much from the teacher, says the student representative, who also takes the pedagogues into protection. “How are you supposed to set up the” perfect “digital teaching without any reasonable further training and functioning technology?”

Federalism as a brake This is where a topic comes into play that has been discussed since the summer, but on which obviously nothing is moving: service laptops for teachers. A program for 500 million euros for the acquisition of the devices was agreed in August at a “school summit” in the Chancellery. Not a single cent has flowed from this, as is evident from a response from the federal government to a request from the FDP parliamentary group that the dpa has received. The answer comes from 13. January. It states that no funds have yet been paid out because the corresponding agreement between the federal and state governments on the 500 million package has not yet been reached has been signed by all federal states.

Nationwide projects in education are repeatedly slowed down by federalism. The federal states are each responsible for education and schools. The federal government is actually not allowed to have a say and simply inject money, which is why so-called administrative agreements between the federal government and all 16 countries are negotiated and then all have to be signed individually. That takes.

“The fact that the federal and state governments have not yet managed to sign the agreements for the purchase of teachers’ laptops is just shameful,” says the FDP chairman for digital infrastructure Bundestag, Torsten Herbst. “While parents, children and teachers have been doing their utmost for weeks to compensate for the loss of face-to-face classes as much as possible, politicians do not even manage to do the simplest administrative homework.”

Technology not up to the number of users According to the digital association Bitkom, the fact that the learning platforms of the federal states sometimes get stuck and jerky is due to the fact that the technology is not up to the user because these platforms are not up to the large number of users. Another obstacle to good distance learning is, according to Bitkom President Achim Berg, “the lack of pragmatism in data protection”. Worldwide leading IT companies have been investing hundreds of millions in conference and learning systems for years. “It’s not easy to recreate. In the pandemic, high-performance systems that are customary on the market should also be made available to schools.” So why don’t they also take place as standard distance learning so that teachers and students stay in touch? That is not the free decision of the individual teacher, said Heinz-Peter Meidinger, President of the German Teachers Association. The prerequisite is that the school has a corresponding license for software and that the necessary data protection is guaranteed. “It is therefore not permissible for a teacher, for example, to invite the students to a zoom session from home.” And with the state learning platforms there is usually no really functional video system.

One must also free oneself from the thought that the digital transmission of lessons in video conference systems is automatically the most effective form of teaching alone or even primarily says the former head of a grammar school who retired in the summer. “A mere transmission of a lesson by video without an intensive feedback culture is not very effective. An intensive exchange via e-mail with worksheets and student contributions can be quite effective and successful.”

Not all bad Meidinger also warns against blanket judgments about distance learning. Given more than 10 million students and 40. 000 Schools should not create an impression that is entirely justified in individual cases is not representative. “My impression is that things are going better overall than in the spring, also because many, but unfortunately by no means all, loan devices have been given to children who have not been able to use a keyboard-compatible computer at home.” Student representative Dario Schramm also sees positive developments: “The truth certainly also includes the fact that there are individual pioneering schools that can offer their students really good distance learning.”

(mho)