Editor's Picks: Why German educational standards are declining

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  Hi, this is Tom Lee Devlin, co-host of Money Talks,

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  our weekly podcast on markets, the economy and business.

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  Welcome to Editor's Picks.

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  Here's an article handpicked from the latest edition of The Economist, read aloud.

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  From May 1st,

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  the proud holders of doctorates will no longer be allowed to put the title doctor in front of their name in German passports.

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  For a country obsessed with qualifications,

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  prof doctors are fairly common and even doctor doctors not so rare,

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  this decline in standing may be hard,

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  but it is not as hard as the decline in German educational standards.

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  The most recent results from three very different testing regimes,

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  comparing pupils of varied ages, point in a single direction, downwards.

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  The best known, the Programme for International Student Assessment,

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  or PISA, tests performance in maths,

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  reading and science among 15-year-olds across some 80 countries every three years.

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  Its most recent scores confirm steep plunges in all three subjects in the past decade in Germany.

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  A separate study that measures reading competence among fourth graders across 65 countries,

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  known by the acronym IGLU,

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  found that 25.4% of the German cohort lacked adequate skills in 2021,

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  up from 18.9% five years earlier and 17% in 2001.

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