The more confusing a situation is, the greater the desire of many for a structure that makes the problem comprehensible. Or a specific size provides for assigning blame. That too is a human impulse, someone must be to blame for the misery. These impulses have been observed in Bavaria’s educational landscape for weeks: the calls for figures on the shortage of teachers are getting louder and louder. And Minister of Education Michael Piazolo (Free Voters) refuses to provide figures. It was “dishonest”, they could be wrong again the next day.
However, if Piazolo wants to refute allegations, he relies – of course – on numbers. An excerpt: 4,630 jobs were created in this legislative period alone, this school year for the first time there are more than 100,000 teachers in Bavaria, 4,300 of whom are newly hired. It’s just not enough with 1.7 million students.
Before the first day of school, Piazolo spoke of “hundreds” of teachers who were missing for the new school year. He couldn’t be more specific. That was early September. He called the situation in the schools “solid”. It hasn’t been more specific since then. “Solid” still applies. The Ministry of Education has now announced that the personnel situation is better than at the beginning of the school year. What does that mean exactly? Stays open.
The explanation attempts from the ministry go like this: naming a number makes no sense, the situation is too dynamic. And these fluctuations are normal. Teachers are pregnant, ill or have recovered, and new contracts are signed. With 100,000 educators, the fluctuation could be in the hundreds every day.
When critics collect numbers themselves, they always come up with values that the Ministry of Education sharply criticizes: The Bavarian Teachers’ Association named a gap of 4,000 educators. In a recent study, the SPD parliamentary group came to a good 2000 for the year 2021. This difference results from the gap between fully trained trainee teachers and teachers who are actually hired. Bavaria hires more teachers than it trains. The source is the report from the Bavarian Ministry of Education to the Conference of Ministers of Education.
You want “apparently Berlin conditions”
The study by the SPD did not provide “any useful results,” Piazolo’s house then complained. One wants to bring about “apparently Berlin conditions” in Bavaria. “We strictly reject that.” The author of the study was State Secretary for School Policy in Berlin. Buoyed by education rankings, Bavaria only looks at Berlin to sniff. In mid-September, Piazolo called the BLLV’s 4000 a “very interesting calculation” and dismantled it as a calculation construct. His advice: “I highly recommend looking at the numbers, especially when they are so general and so high.”
A way out of this little dance could lie where teachers work, not where they are absent. According to internal documents from the government of Upper Bavaria, 61,061 teachers are currently working part-time in Bavaria’s primary schools and 12,153 in middle schools. Many of them work part-time, i.e. with less than 50 percent. This results in a “loss” of 2631 so-called full-time capacities. If some of these teachers were to be increased, the elementary, special and middle schools would already be helped. They are the worst affected by the teacher shortage. However, these educators will probably have reasons for wanting to work part-time and they were sentenced to overtime at the beginning of 2020. By order of the Minister, the excitement was enormous. Neither Piazolo nor Prime Minister Markus Söder want to go that far, it remains with appeals. In a year before the state elections, neither of them have any interest in a new edition of the teacher anger. If they shy away from coercion, the only option is to entice.