Turn of the Tide New Horizons in German Education Policymaking through IO Influence
The recent years of German education policymaking have been characterized by immense changes and continuing reform dynamics. Particularly in comparison to previous decades, which were a period of stagnation and marginal adjustments, far reaching reforms in both secondary and higher education have taken place since the late 1990s. However, national factors did not provide the main impulse for this rediscovery of education policy. First and foremost, initiatives on the international level promoted by international organizations (IOs) were responsible for putting issues of education back on the agenda. In secondary education, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) as carried out by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) influenced themes and debates in matters of education policy (Jakobi and Martens 2007; Martens 2007) PISA revealed the mediocrity of Germany's education system compared to other industrialized countries in late 2001 and triggered an intensive discourse about improving secondary education. It became obvious that reforms to modernize the German school system were inevitable. For higher education, efforts at the European level to create a common university sector undertaken under the label "Bologna Process" gradually became linked to the European Union (EU)1 and stimulated an ongoing process of reorganization of the German system (Hahn 2004)