420 EMMANUEL DROIT AND WILFRIED RUDLOFF
be ahead of the game rather than behind. Naturally, it was much eas-
ier to confl ate the Hauptschule and the Realschule into one school in the
East, without keeping the separate tracks, than in the West, where there
was a more stubborn structural and political resistance to such measures.
In the new federal states, moreover, the legacy of the integrated GDR
school system still played a considerable role. Since 80 percent of POS
pupils had earned a diploma equivalent to that of the mid-level Realschule
qualifi cation in the West, it was not likely that the idea of setting up a
Hauptschule would have been welcomed in the East.^121 Yet the two-track
model that was adopted was primarily a response to two fundamental
social processes at work in both East and West Germany. On the one
hand, demographic changes stemming from dropping birth rates (which
bottomed out for a while in the new federal states after 1989) factored
into this consideration. On the other hand, the spiral of expectations that
had been unleashed by the expansion of the education system meant that
not only the educational background of the parent generation but also the
aspirations of these parents to send their children to higher-level schools
increased (as has been clearly refl ected in parental decisions related to
school choice). The sinking birthrate, for example, indicated that it was
going to become even more diffi cult to maintain both a Hauptschule and a
Realschule, especially in rural areas. Moreover, rising educational aspira-
tions continued to feed the ongoing exodus from the Hauptschule, which
was in danger of becoming nothing more than a catch-all school for the
Bildungsverlierer, the pupils who lost out in the educational system.^122 Not
only with the two-track system, but also the twelve-grade model, the Abi-
tur exams centralized at the state level, the expansion of full-day schools,
the call for more educational preschools, and the push to better promote
highly talented pupils, the old federal states found themselves confronted
with reform aspects that were rather familiar to the politicians and educa-
tionalists who knew about the institutional structures of the defunct GDR.
The two-pillar model that was developed speaks to a process of cau-
tious cotransformation: at the beginning of the new millennium, the school
structures in the Western federal states, too, began to change.^123 The
majority of the old federal states set up a second pillar in their schools
systems at the stage of the Sekundarstufe I (secondary education fi rst
stage), that stands alongside the fi rst, inviolable pillar of the Gymnasium.
Whereas the Gymnasium has proved to be the sole immutable commonal-
ity within the federalist jungle of the school system, the Hauptschule and
the Realschule have been moved under one roof in the old states, which
was similar to what had happened in the former East. Many of these new
schools still off er separate tracks that lead to diff erent diplomas or leav-
ing certifi cates. Since they were not introduced in a uniform way across