He is powerful in words, the man who juggles Berlin’s billions: SPD budget spokesman Torsten Schneider likes to talk everyone down to earth. Last week, Schneider went back to the microphone. His task: to smash the CDU motion for disapproval against the SPD education senator.
Schneider praised the Berlin teaching staff, only to inadvertently tear down the backdrop of the good Berlin school in the last sentence when he certified the senator to “hang into the Moloch”.
juggernaut? The word that Schneider tumbled out of his mouth has it all. Because the Moloch is a “cruel power that constantly demands new victims and threatens to devour everyone,” says the dictionary – derived from the Bible, where “Moloch” meant the burning of children as offerings. So that’s how it is: Schneider credits the criticized senator with the fact that she at least opposes the cruel power: “She hangs herself in the Moloch.”
Schneider said something very true about that. Because the Berlin school actually devours its children. And that has to do with the party for which the Parliamentary Secretary spoke in the plenary session.
Because the social democracy has deprived the schools of their offspring with a mixture of a lack of study places and refusal to become civil servants, which is unique in Germany: 1,000 positions will remain vacant for the summer. In addition, around one in three teachers came into office without a teaching degree.
What do these career changers know about learning processes and behavioral disorders? How do you teach migrants German? Who of you knows how to recognize dyslexia? In the next school year, to add to all the evils, there will be a shortage of even more special education teachers.
The SPD bears the main responsibility for this situation because it has been determining education policy for over a quarter of a century. Their senators were also wedged between their party friends in the finance department, in the parliamentary group and at party congresses.
At no other point is this more evident than with the shortage of teachers: although all other states nationwide gradually returned to civil servants in order to counteract the emigration of teachers, the Berlin SPD stuck to its party doctrine.
Even when in 2019 not even lateral entrants were enough to fill the gaps, the party congress said “no” to civil servants. He later had his education experts buy his “yes” in return for a promise to waive teaching from employed teachers who cannot or do not want to be civil servants – an impossibility under collective bargaining law.
But how do you call it when you have to take a party for fools by making proposals that are impossible to implement, just so that they agree to the only way at the moment to secure the teachers in Berlin, namely civil servants?
In view of this disaster, the Greens are often accused of spurning the office. But this rejection also falls back on the SPD, because it has damaged the Berlin school in such a way that this department only produces losers.
Torsten Schneider must have thought of all of this when he slipped out the horrible word. juggernaut If the SPD still believes it can defeat the juggernaut, that could already be proven at next Sunday’s party congress – through Realpolitik.
