EDUCATIONAL RIVALRIES 423
the light the tight link between social background and the acquisition of
skills.^132
After about two decades of fairly static school policy, the PISA study
put the public spotlight on educational policy in the country. The study’s
results did not create nearly as much of a stir in any of the other partic-
ipating countries.^133 In Germany, however, the school policy makers of
the states were bombarded with criticism; the Kultusministerkonferenz
(KMK), which is the standing assembly of the state educational minis-
tries, felt compelled to respond in its guise as the national coordinating
body for school policy. This sudden, newly awakened interest in edu-
cational policy opened a window of opportunity for reforms. The PISA
report sparked a strong interest in the question of which factors in the
“winning states” had contributed to their success. Education experts and
policy makers trekked in great herds to the Scandinavian countries and
especially Finland, the much-admired “PISA winner,” in order to take
a look at the particularities of the respective school systems. It did not
take long before an entire catalog of reforms were put on the table.^134
The introduction of national “education standards” stood at the heart of
these plans. Once passed by the ministries of culture, the new standards
were supposed to be obligatory for all states. The standards determined
the skills that pupils were supposed to have acquired in a given subject
by the end of each year of schooling.^135 Not only was the entire school
system now subject to continual evaluation, but also comparative test-
ing was supposed to assess the performance of the single schools and
individual pupils according to these standards. “Quality assurance” thus
became the name of the game in school policy, and educational standards
and performance evaluations were seen as two sides of the same coin.
The federal government also took advantage of this opportunity to be-
come more involved in school policy, although the federal states were
still very wary of large-scale federal initiatives. The Red-Green coalition
government, for example, set aside four billion euros to fund an increase
in full-day schooling options. Such eff orts were accompanied by other
reforms, such as the introduction of a centralized Abitur at the level of the
federal states, which had already been put in place in four of the fi ve new
states, as well as in Bavaria, Saarland, and Baden-Württemberg, in ad-
dition to cutting the length of the Gymnasium attendance to eight years.
By instituting a centralized Abitur, the idea was to ensure the compara-
bility of the leaving certifi cates across the diff erent states, and even the
SPD-led states went from being opponents to proponents of this reform.
Shortening the length of the Gymnasium track, on the other hand, was
sympathetic to the fi nance ministers who saw a chance to save money.
The eight-year Abitur, however, was not very popular in the West and was