Germany’s 16 states are traditionally responsible for schooling, similar in some ways to the U.S. education system. Yet in Germany, following the release of the first PISA scores, the states and federal government quickly agreed on a plan to establish a new set of common standards. So in 2004, a nonprofit tasked with developing the math, reading, writing, and foreign-language standards and accompanying tests—the Institute for Quality Development in Education (IQB)—opened, and by 2006 children were taking its assessments. Housed at Berlin’s Humboldt University, the organization works closely with the state education agencies. “This was a widespread or large-scale intervention program where the ministries in all German states collaborated with researchers and teacher educators, and there was a shared understanding of good science and math teaching,” says Eckhard Klieme, who oversees the German Institute for International Educational Research.

But the new tests aren’t meant to serve as tools that monitor and penalize schools, says the IQB director Petra Stanat. Instead, they’re meant to provide feedback to individual teachers and schools and drive instruction. Before the new tests, for example, middle-school teachers might have assumed that all their students had already become competent at reading in elementary school when that wasn’t always the case. “The focus on the weaker students increased,” says Stanat, in response to the new standards. The shift in priorities has had promising results, according to Kleime: “What we found was that the important gains that show up in the mean scores [were] due to an increase in the lower end of the distribution—the low SES students, mostly migrant students, they improved… Something really important happened with the migrant population.” (To monitor student progress at the national level, Germany has developed a separate set of tests that are administered every few years.)

The proportion of working-class and low-income students going to Gymnasium—college-prep high school—slowly increased. And in Germany today, nearly 29 percent of students receive the high-school degree that qualifies them for university, a steady increase over time. Proportionally, more immigrants of the younger generation are taking and passing exams (Abitur) that allow them to go university, though it is still much less than those who don’t have immigrant backgrounds.

According to the OECD’s Schleicher, Germany may be witnessing the positive effects of de-tracking—that is, getting rid of a school system in which students are segregated based on whether they’re preparing for basic work, trade professions, or university. Germany had long separated children as young as 10 into vocational or university tracks; and while other countries’ school systems do have programs that separate students by ability, few do so for such young children. But those traditions are starting to evolve. Many of Germany’s 16 states, including Berlin and Saxony, recently decided to phase out the lowest-level secondary school (Hauptschule), in part because parents criticized the program as leading students directly to low-wage jobs. In those states, students now attend comprehensive schools that allow them to move between vocational and university-bound tracks. “The tracking system is a big part of the problem in Germany,” says Schleicher, adding that international comparisons based on PISA data “absolutely” show that tracking holds back the most disadvantaged students. In “most of the countries with highly equitable results”—Korea and Norway, for example—you don’t see tracking.”