Schools Deserve More Than Sensational Headlines

Guest contribution by Annette Kuhn

Search Google News for ‘school life’ and you’re immediately confronted with headlines such as “Berlin’s Teachers Are at Breaking Point”, “Student’s Threat: ‘I’ll Gun Down All of You’”, “I Can’t Help but Wonder What We’re Doing to These Kids?”, “Stress, Tension, Conflicts”, “Teachers Describe Alarming Conditions”. Barely a day goes by without another school horror story.

Are conditions in Germany’s almost 33,000 allgemeinbildende Schulen (general education schools) really that bad? Or are they just portrayed that way? Both are true to some extent. Not every school is “bad”. Indeed, many of them help their students succeed in spite of very difficult circumstances. Such schools are happily attended every day by teachers and students alike. Nonetheless, there are problems in the education system, serious problems.

There is the ongoing shortage of teachers, for example, exacerbated by a temporary spike in birth rates, as well as by immigration and a recent wave of retirements. There are the student performance rates, which have been in steady decline for the past decade. There is growing education inequality: in barely any other country is academic success so dependent on parents’ socioeconomic background. There is the poor mental health of young people, which makes learning and teaching a daily challenge. For far too long, these problems have been met with a kind of weary resignation. The media needs to pay them attention. But the question is how? Sensational headlines will certainly not help.

It generally plays out as follows: an overburdened school is singled out and defamed as a “problem school”. This is exactly what happened with Berlin’s Friedrich Bergius school in 2024. The teaching staff sent a distressed open letter – a veritable call for help – to the school authorities. Teaching normal classes had become all but impossible, with bullying, violence and a lack of respect for teachers a daily reality.

It was not the first Berlin school to raise the alarm and ask for support. In 2006, teachers at the Rütli School in Berlin-Neukölln sent a similar letter. At times, classes could only take place under police protection. Focussing on individual schools, however, distracts us from the structural issues. It’s not just Berlin that has schools like the Rütli or Bergius. They can be found all over Germany. And while individual schools may manage to turn things around, the systematic problems remain unsolved.

Education journalists need to act with special care and responsibility given that the coverage can have a profound effect on the children and teenagers in question. Who wants to attend a ramshackle school that is the subject of public ridicule? Parents, too, are affected, and are unlikely to send their kids to these schools in the wake of such stories. It becomes very difficult to build trust in the fact that children are being well looked after. For their part, teachers will also be affected, and may end up feeling their work has no impact at all.

Ultimately, both of the Berlin schools did indeed manage to turn things around. “From Battlefield to Educational Idyll” ran one of the headlines on the reinvention of the Rütli School four years after the open letter. From one superlative label to another. In reality, a great deal was invested in the school – funding, staff, preventive measures. Yet, precisely how challenges are overcome, however, is rarely given much attention. And when stories do make it into the media, they usually spotlight the “school saviors”: the principals or teachers who drive the turnaround.

Take Engin Çatik, for example, who took over as principal of the Friedrich Bergius School at the beginning of 2025 following the publication of the letter. His main focus is on building relationships, opening the school every morning at 7:45 and personally greeting the students. He also introduced a subject called Empathy in which young people learn how to grow freely while also respecting the space others need to do the same. The underlying idea: from “me” to “we”.

It's not enough to look with dismay at one school alone. This outcry may well be necessary to provoke debate sometimes, but we need to dig deeper. Journalists need to look at the structural level if they want to support sustainable improvements in schools across Germany.

To understand what makes schooling today so challenging, you need knowledge: of education and curricula; of school development; of changing demographics in the student body; of Germany’s education system; and of the factors that shape academic success. Moreover, Germany consists of 16 federal states, each with its own complex education system. Understanding them all is no mean feat.

Nuanced reporting in education journalism also means resisting the urge to make snap judgements. One relevant example is mental health in young people. One third of children and young people feel lonely, 14 percent show symptoms of depression, and the number of girls under 18 diagnosed with eating disorders has doubled in the past 20 years. Portraying children as excessively fragile is not helpful. Nor is it useful to abolish everything that might put any kind of pressure on students. Indeed, while we absolutely must not trivialize the issue, we need to pose the bold question as to whether the attention the topic currently receives is unhealthy or counterproductive.

The education debate needs less outrage and more context, less drama and more analysis. Schools are a fundamental part of our democracy, and they deserve more than sensational headlines. It is the responsibility of anyone who covers them not to compress this complicated reality into brief attention cycles.

Annette Kuhn is an experienced education journalist and moderated the Publix event “When School Becomes a Story” on November 20th.

Photocredit: Bildungsdossier