A LoomingTeacher Shortage Threatens German Youth
By Nicholas Karmia
At 3 p.m. the final bell tone rings and the hallways at the Ruth-Cohn-Schule flood with students. The school day has ended at this teacher training institute in the Charlottenburg area of Berlin. But for Dagmar Kappel, it’s simply a transition to the next phase of her workday.
Free time is scarce for Kappel, who is often up until midnight preparing lessons and grading assignments. Her colleagues had invited her for a night out, but Kappel knows their discussions will inevitably center on the trials of teaching these days.
“You don’t really have a life. It’s something you really do from the bottom of your heart,” Kappel said. “It’s a full-time job and always takes part of your private life.”
Heavy workloads for educators, a lack of transparency, and poor communication among key stakeholders in the education system has taken its toll and is now threatening Germany’s youth. By 2030, a growing teacher shortage is predicted to leave Germany’s education system short by up to 80,000 positions, putting future generations at risk of an unsustainable future.
Since she entered the field in 2005, Kappel has noticed that many educators — particularly those who work with small children — have been poorly treated, in what is supposed to be a nurturing profession.
“They’ve been very neglected by politics,” Kappel said. “They don’t earn enough. They don’t have enough people. There’s something really wrong with the system.”
Just 7% of German higher education students are studying to become teachers, according to data collected by the Robert Bosch Foundation at the beginning of 2023. Aspiring educators such as Emil Raiser, have been getting a taste of the teaching profession one day at a time, and it can turn them off the profession.
Raiser has been interning as a teacher’s assistant (TA) for the past eight months at the Wilhelm-von-Humboldt Gemeinschaftsschule, a community school with 800 students in Berlin’s Pankow area, that runs from first through 12th grades.
Raiser wanted to gain first-hand experience, to find out if the vocation was right for him but his foray into the field has raised some doubts. When it comes to the classroom setting, students and teachers are facing overcrowding which compromises the teaching process and frustrates many.
“An average size would be around 26 students. I’d say five excel, five really struggle hard — like it’s quite worrisome — then [the others] are doing fine,” Raiser said. “I mean, they don’t excel. You kind of have to remind them.”
Many students end up falling behind because of inadequate individualized support — especially those with learning disabilities. These students quickly start to lose their personal interest and motivation to learn. And the need for individual attention is even greater in neighborhoods with large immigrant populations, where students are learning a new language.
“The teachers are way too overworked and don’t have the necessary help from others to be able to lead the class they want to,” Raiser said.
An insufficient teacher-student ratio has led to other problems. In eight months as a TA, Raiser has witnessedd teacher strikes at both his school and others.
“Teachers go on strike quite regularly. Nearly every two months for several days a week protesting that the classrooms are unmanageable,” Raiser said.
In Berlin last year, 973 full-time positions remained unfilled across the school system, with 1,460 expected to remain vacant in this upcoming school year.
Andreja Orsag has taught her entire professional career of 23 years at the Ruth-Cohn-Schule, where Kappel works, a vocational college for students aged 16 to 57. She’s been the headmistress since 2016. Orsag says many elementary schools are dealing not only with a shortage problem, but also with a teaching staff who have no prior teaching experience.
“More than 60% to 70% of the staff are not teachers,” Orsag said. “They had other professions and then decided to become teachers and were employed because there is nobody else.”
To become a teacher within Berlin, an individual must obtain a bachelor’s and master’s degree and attend a preparatory program for two years, during which time they work at a school while simultaneously attending seminars and lectures. After completing these steps, a student must pass a second state examination, fully entitling them to become a teacher in the Berlin public school system.
Complicating the matter is that each of the 16 German states has their own set of required qualifications to become a teacher.
Orsag argues that the education provided for students studying to become teachers is far too theoretical and conceptually based. “The first part of the education really doesn’t have anything to do with the job,” Orsag said.
People pursuing a career in teaching aren’t being shown the classroom environment adequately, she says.
“This is what we call practice shock,” Orsag said. “The students come from the university or city where they are educated in a very theoretical way, and the professors who teach them haven’t been in a real school for the last 30 years. They don’t really know what is going on here, and if you ask me, some of them are not really interested in it.”
When aspiring teachers are finally put into the classroom after all the study they did beforehand, many decide the field is not right for them and switch fields.
“They had good grades, but they never experienced how it is to teach for six or eight hours every day in the classroom with 30 very different people,” Orsag said. “It is an extremely stressful job.”
Teacher-in-training Luka Preibsch is also unsure whether to pursue what used to be his professional dream. Preibsch is pursuing his bachelor’s degree to become a teacher within the Berlin school system but many of his peers who have gone through the teaching internship phase of their education have decided to drop out because of it.
“Many of them go into a shock and that mirrors the quitting [statistics],” Preibsch said. “Bachelor’s degrees with the teaching option have one of the highest quitting numbers of all the study programs in university.”
Coming from a family with an extensive teaching background, he’s critical of teacher training, the balance of content between theoretical pedagogy and the real-life practice of teaching.
“I think we already have a crisis,” Preibsch said. “It’s a very long study that you have to conduct or follow in order to be employed as a teacher. It’s very fatal that the students at the universities aren’t included into the system of school directly from the beginning.”
The Berlin Senate’s department for education, youth and family, oversees the state’s education system, including that of the education standards needed to become a teacher.
“There is no real communication between universities and the part of the Senate which is responsible for schools,” college administrator Orsag said. “There are two different worlds, and this is one of the biggest problems in my eyes.”
This lack of communication has only furthered the divide between what’s happening at the local and state levels.
“Everybody is blaming somebody else,” Orsag said. “The universities are blaming schools because the students who come to the universities are not educated well enough. The schools are blaming the universities because they obviously don’t teach them things that they need in their job.”
Stefan Düll was last month inaugurated as president of the German Teachers’ Association, which is the largest teaching organization in Germany, representing 165,000 teachers all over the country. Düll also leads teaching seminars at Justus-von-Liebig-Gymnasium Neusäß, near Augsburg, where he serves as headmaster of the school.
According to Düll, the current system in place to train future teachers still works for teachers to become successful in the field.
“The idea is we start slowly. They shall learn. They shall look. They shall learn from one another,” Düll said. “They also watch the lessons of their colleagues who also are on the learning track. Then they share their experiences.”
The German Teachers’ Association has examined the data to discover when these mass teacher shortages will hit. Through analyzing state records on variables such as the number of students, schools, and even the number of classes being taught across Germany, the association projects tens of thousands of vacant teacher positions by 2030 — something those in power have yet to look at in terms of long-term consequences.
“No one actually denies it on the state side but usually, because of the political terms of four years, they only think in these terms of four years,” Düll said. “There is a tendency to look at current elections and not so much about what will happen [in] the next 10 or even 20 years.”
One of the main solutions Düll wants to bring to the table is to have part-time teachers transition into more full-time work. “Those part time workers could work more, actually,” Düll said. “Some people would really increase the number of lessons they want to teach.”
One critical change that headmistress Orsag wants to see is for teacher training to be more practical in the classroom environment so that future educators know exactly what they’re getting into.
“Teachers’ education at universities should be completely reformed, because there is so much unnecessary stuff,” Orsag said. “They have to deal for months and months with things they will never need at school.”
The results for elementary, middle and high school students, she said, are already apparent and will only get worse.
“We have some kids in third grade who are not able to spell. They do not know all 26 letters of the alphabet,” Orsag said. “We have to really focus on these issues, and on these kids who are not so fortunate.”
The consequences for an unsustainable education system with thousands of vacant positions is “catastrophic,” says Orsag, and will drive future generations down a dangerously steep road, at a time when Germany’s workforce already lacks a skilled labor pool.
“It’s the worst nightmare,” she said. “We already have so many young people who are on the streets without any degree. We need an educational system in which we provide a way for everybody.”
Nicholas Karmia is a student at College of DuPage in Illinois, and is a Staff Writer at its student newspaper The Courier. This summer he has reported from Berlin as part of the “Berlin Beyond Borders” editorial team.
