Why are there differences across German states in student achievement and cognitive ability?

For more than twenty years, large and generally stable differences in academic achievement and cognitive ability have been reported within Germany. In such studies, the southern regions lead in the west and east, while city-states lag behind. Expressed in school learning time, the students in Bavaria are 14 months ahead of the students in Bremen. It is striking that there are no or only marginally received studies on causes and consequences.

This study attempts to explore the causes and consequences of the differences within Germany and what can be learned in general about their development.

We use data from student assessment and other studies (e.g., PISA, IQB) and apply correlational and path analyses, controlled for various background factors.

There are no stable correlations with evolution (genes), educational level of society (adult school years) and wealth (GDP per capita). However, there are high correlations, robust across indicators, with "burgher-conservative" education policies, e.g., central exit examinations, early tracking, grades at a young age (around r ≈ .65); with measures of students' quantity of education (hours of instruction, no teacher shortage; r ≈ .40); with measures of tertiary educational quality and appreciation of education (university quality, short duration of studies, professors' salaries; r ≈ .50); with student native/immigrant ratio (r ≈ .50); with middle-class burgher lifestyle (less private debt, less welfare dependency and less crime; r ≈ .60); and with burgher-conservative-right politics (share of votes for CDU/CSU and non-left parties, non-left state governments; r ≈ .80). Longitudinal analyses over four decades reveal interaction effects, i.e., more burgher policies statistically lead to more cognitively competent students (β ≈ .45) and more cognitively competent populations vote for burgher parties (β ≈ .30).

The results, which support the efficacy a bourgeois-conservative education policy and of lower immigration rates, are delicate for the practice of student achievement research and for the political milieu that dominates the social sciences.