Translator: Robert Tucker Reviewer: Denise RQ
Thank you!
Thank you! Is the mike working? Yes.
Seems to be. Good!
I would like to invite you to briefly shut your eyes
and to think of someone,
who is responsible for your being here today,
for your having decided to study,
for your having managed to pass your final school exams
and for your having found a way on.
Now you can open your eyes,
but maybe keep that person in the back of your mind,
that picture of this exceptional person.
I also had such a person.
He was Mr Barratt.
Mr Barratt was my English teacher from eighth grade.
I had started English quite a while before,
but when I knew I would soon be in the classroom,
I became hot and I really wanted to just escape.
For I scarcely had so much fear for anything else
than to speak English out loud or to read a text aloud again.
And then came Mr Barratt.
And it really didn't matter to him, didn't matter at all,
what I said or how I said it,
the only one important thing was that I said something.
And he'd break it all down
and thereby got me to expand my knowledge of the English language bit by bit.
A year later, I put in for a school exchange with Los Angeles
and in my high school I was the second best in English, in my year.
So what does all this mean?
I was lucky.
I had a role model and I had a supporter
and I had someone who believed in me and encouraged me to learn this language.
And so I've learned quite a lot for the rest of my life.
In Germany
unfortunately, there are many, many children and adolescents,
who have no such role models and supporters.
In numbers, that means something like this, for example:
one in five primary school child already has a special need
for maths help, in the fourth grade;
hardly a chance to successfully complete secondary school.
Over 50,000 young people leave school every year
without a proper leaving certificate
and 19% of 15-year olds cannot read
at a level where they can understand a simple newspaper article.
The shock of this hit me in 2006.
And so it was, that in Berlin, one school - the Rütli School, in Neukölln -
which perhaps means something to a few here, published an urgent letter.
The staff said that it was no longer possible to learn at this school.
Everyday was dominated by violence, disrespect, and desperation.
And just at this time, I had to think carefully about
what I wanted to write my master's thesis on.
And somehow, I did not feel like just creating an academic work,
which then was read by perhaps just my professor or corrector
and otherwise, interested no one at all.
And so these two little themes came together and led me to go
in search of how troubled areas
and education can be a recipe for success.
And I found it in Harlem.
So I arrived at this school and went through the barred entrance
and then a check by two policemen.
In the school, there was great fear
that the drug dealers from the neighbourhood
already approached second graders
and wanted to include them in their dealing.
This shocked me quite a lot,
since, of course, it wasn't quite this bad in Neukölln yet.
I got to one of the classrooms where a second grade class was sitting,
20, highly-focused and interested faces looked at me.
Just one of them was white.
In an area where a maximum of 10% of the population gain entrance to college
who then proceeds to obtain a college leaving certificate
is something else again.
And these 20 second graders had one ambition in mind.
And they showed this ambition pictorially on their classroom wall.
They had, in fact put there the College Walk of Fame
for each and every child.
This idea was brought to them by a young teacher
who had come from Los Angeles to NY
who knew, of course, from Los Angeles the Hollywood Boulevard Walk of Fame.
And she had therefore worked with each child
to determine what each of these steps should look like
in order that one from the second class in Harlem
ten years later could go onto college and there successfully gain
a college leaving certificate.
You have to know that those in this class who had just entered the second grade,
were already, both in reading and in arithmetic,
lagging far behind what their peers could achieve
on the Upper East Side in New York, for example,
because they just did not get the necessary encouragement.
But these children had a goal
and they knew that they got support to achieve this goal,
namely from this young woman from Los Angeles.
And behind this young woman was an organization, Teach for America,
which supported her to achieve this goal with her class.
That's Steffen.
Steffen was himself at a high school in Baden-Württemberg
and Steffen was lucky.
He was not only very intelligent,
but he also had a teacher who recognized his potential
and spoke with Steffen and his parents about whether the possibility existed
for him to gain school leaving qualifications
and thereby helped development beyond the high school.
And that Steffen has achieved.
For sure it wasn't really easy for him in this completely new grammar school
where many children from completely different backgrounds were around him.
And he wished many times for just a little information
about how it was all going to work.
How was he going to obtain his school leaving certificate?
He succeeded and became an engineer.
He then worked for a very large German company
and among other things brought power plants into operation in Azerbaijan,
that is, under his supervision, our former high school student, Steffen,
of whom no one would have originally expected it.
And after a few years with this concern Steffen decided to do something else
and applied to Teach First Germany.
And so he returned to a secondary school
and before him stood a class that you see here below,
and Steffen thought there is much, much more talent here than we think
and he founded the Abi 2015 AG.
And so in 2010 he started with a group of pupils
to work on how they could make their way
to obtaining a school leaving certificate and study further.
And this summer he accompanied them to the schools for further development.
And now Steffen looks forward to the 2015 school-leaving celebrations
with his former students.
I'm sure that they will make it.
Here are Stefan and Fiona.
Stefan is a political scientist; Fiona is a qualified mathematician.
The two were placed together in a school in Wedding in Berlin.
And they have made sure
that from the former 2 out of 60 secondary school students
who obtained a middle school certificate in maths, it is now 20.
And that has persuaded them with the other experiences they gained
during their two-year deployment with Teach First Germany
to found a school themselves, a private school in Wedding,
where there's a migrant quota of almost 90%
and a quota of high school graduates of maximally 10%.
Stefan and Fiona are about to establish this school
and with the aim of taking in pupils who never in their life
could afford a private school.
And with which they contract from day one
that every student who starts there
will leave the school with a school leaving certificate.
And these are exactly the same students who currently go to school in Welling.
And I'm sure that the two will succeed,
although there is still a lot of work ahead of them.
How have we arrived, or anyway how have I arrived,
at all this being possible?
I came back from the U.S. and got really excited about this idea,
and totally secure in the conviction
that troubled areas and educational achievement
need not be mutually exclusive, but that it is absolutely possible.
And I found the concept which I discovered was the absolutely correct one.
So I went off and had discussions with headteachers,
with education authorities, foundations, with companies, with graduates
and with newspapers to tell them about it
and to infect them with my enthusiasm.
Here I would now like to tell you of only one of these many conversations,
but it's totally typical.
I sat with the head of the former or the then Rütli School in Neukölln
and told him about a fictitious Stefan and a fictitious Fiona
whom I still did not know at the time.
I asked him what he would think about it if such a person
were to come to his school for two years.
And then he looked at me and said: "Fantastic, wonderful,
but now my dear Frau Landsberg we must both wake up again,
for that is entirely impossible in Germany.
Firstly, you won't find these graduates,
then it would take two years before it arrived in Neukölln.
That's insanity, you can do something much better with your life,
and even if you were to achieve it,
to convince someone or the other this is possible or might be fun or useful
then you'll never get the educational bureaucracy to allow it;
and anyway, who should pay for the whole thing?"
So that was the starting point in 2007,
when I had just begun to start the first talks.
And I was so convinced that this was really the right thing,
that I said: "After I finish my degree I am applying
not for a job, but for money so that I can build this team,
that makes this possible."
And that is then what we did and achieved
with a lot of patience and a lot of spit and much, much luck after two years.
The first fellows went into the schools in 2009,
in Berlin, Hamburg, and North Rhine-Westphalia.
Now we have nearly a hundred alumni, who, like Fiona and Stefan,
and now also Steffen, work on their own ideas,
on how education could be changed
or even as business consultants or in administrative positions.
And now we have even recruited for the fourth year
and have just about 80 such fellows in placements in Germany.
And with these fellows, naturally much happens during their placements;
they not only support their students,
but they also undergo changes within themselves.
It becomes clear to them it is possible, that these results are achievable,
and so much more potential resides in the children and adolescents
in our troubled neighborhoods,
than we think.
And these fellows help us realize our vision.
In Germany every child obtains a school leaving qualification
which sets the stage for further training.
In every school in Germany pupils should develop to be independent,
young people who have learned to use their full potential
and regardless of their origins
led by their strengths and their interests
be able to take responsibility in society.
That is our goal and that is what we want to implement.
Today, my idols are Stefan or Fiona or Simon.
And I want to ask you today if you'd also like to be an idol.
Thank you!
(Applause)