On the advantage and disadvantage of educational monitoring in a federal system

Abstract

In Germany, monitoring of the education system (“Bildungsmonitoring”) has become an element of a comprehensive system of quality development and safeguarding standards. The German federal states commit themselves to a joint program of transparency by making the working conditions and achievement of educational institutions as well as effects of education policy visible to the general public. But this is not the specific historical peculiarity of the situation in a federal system. Rather, the outrageous development of the German community of federal states is the introduction of a new governance system in a concerted action since the 1990s. The contribution sketches at first some central features of monitoring of the education system and presents a critical analysis of its nature as systemic monitoring. The second part presents dilemmas that accompany the implementation of monitoring in a federal system. The last chapter discusses the problem if the normative demands that monitoring imposes on educational institutions opens up the expectation that the monitoring systems themselves are monitored with the same ethical claims: that they are integrated in an ethical concept of responsibility.