424 EMMANUEL DROIT AND WILFRIED RUDLOFF
therefore quickly repealed in many places.^136 All told, a noticeably larger
number of changes were made in a relatively short period compared to
what had been done in the two decades prior to PISA. In subsequent
PISA studies, German pupils slowly began to improve their position in
the rankings and the social disparities have become less pronounced.^137
Conclusion
The history of German-German education after 1945 was shaped by in-
creasing disentanglements. Whereas West Germany reestablished the basic
coordinates of the educational system of the Weimar Republic after 1945,
education in the SBZ (Sowjetische Besatzungszone, Soviet Occupation
Zone)/GDR departed from this shared German legacy, sometimes very
quickly. The history of education in Germany remained nonetheless—
albeit in an asymmetrical way—interwoven at diff erent levels. These links
ranged from the shared cultural legacy that could still be found in the
canon of knowledge for schools, the exodus of highly qualifi ed individ-
uals from the East to the West before the Wall went up in 1961, or the
persistence of some institutional commonalities. Moreover, the two edu-
cational systems were interrelated as a result of the mutual observation
and oppositional demarcation processes that existed between the two
countries. Likewise, both educational systems had to respond to over-
arching challenges that arose in the decades that followed with answers
that were specifi c to their own systems. These common challenges in-
cluded the issue of how to guarantee equal educational opportunities or
how to deal with the anticipated and unexpected consequences of edu-
cational expansion. Similarly, schools and universities on both sides of
the Wall found themselves grappling with the tension between talent dif-
ferentiation and uniformity, as well as the correlation between education
and the job market.
Furthermore, there was a political dimension to these educational en-
tanglements. These political aspects appeared clearly in the discourse
on education in the late 1950s and 1960s that honed in on the Bildungs-
wettlauf (educational contest)^138 between East and West Germany, which
was itself a part of the wider framework of the international and German-
German rivalry between the systems. Yet, especially in the educational
boom years of the 1960s and early 1970s in West Germany, the desire not
to fall behind the educational systems of the other Western industrialized
states proved to be even stronger. The quantitative parameters of educa-
tional expansion put about by the OECD, which were seen as a factor of
economic growth, had a considerable infl uence in the Federal Republic.