Introduction to public education: historical and contemporary perspectives
In this special issue, authors analyze the role of public education in relation to its historical purpose, considering the history of public education and the evolution of its concepts in relation to nation-building over time, as well as some of the contemporary challenges facing public education today. Complementary as well as competing factors are examined that are framing public education in two democratic nation states with a history of state-based or federalist education systems, similarities and different reforms, and dialogues that have occurred with varying intensity regarding public education: Germany and the United States (U.S.). In both countries, modern public education was shaped during the 18th and 19th centuries. In the U.S., public education is closely linked to the development of the U.S. as a nation from distinct colonies in 1776; in Germany this development took place in different regions that did not form a unified country until 1871. Many similarities and transnational discourses about education can be found as well as some fundamental differences regarding the role of public education. Mass immigration, for example, has always shaped the American education system, whereas in Germany attention to this phenomenon and its implications for schooling only arose late in the 20th century.
Historically, in many nation states, public education has played a critical role in the founding, development and unification of citizens’ identities, thU.S. reflecting society and its political governance system. In other words, public education played an important role in building a citizenry with common values, a common language and shared traditions. The debates between private and public education as well as tensions between competing interests date back to the Early Modern Age and the gradual introduction of new governing structures in Germany and the U.S., with topics including the tension between religious and cultural plurality and unity or community. In this context, nation-building appears as a fluid process (Anderson, 2016) in which the growth and gradual unification of school systems, on the one hand, and the expansion of administrative state structures, on the other, formed a fruitful interaction. In this way, in nation states that developed out of former empires, the development of school systems is a major characteristic of political transformation (Osterhammel, 2014: 423). School systems also served as a stabilizing force within nation-building processes (Spring, 2010) in nation states that were built upon migration processes, such as the U.S.. During the vast migration waves – for example, in the Progressive Era in the early 1900s – schooling became a critical factor in homogenizing an increasingly diverse society by shaping future citizens in views deemed to be essential for the growing nation. In perhaps the most prominent example, Dewey (1916) argued that group activity work in classrooms with their social organization and norms supported national unity and commonality among diverse citizens.
If we look at contemporary challenges to the role of public education in the 21st-century nation state, we see perennial tensions as well as new and numerous developments that vary from the capacity of the public systems to adapting to the demands of globalization and to accommodating the multiple and often contradictory demands voiced from different ideological, social and cultural perspectives. With increasing internal demographic changes combined with global population migrations in many democratic nation states, including the U.S. and Germany, national policymakers, state policymakers and public school leaders are challenged to educate unified, educated citizens of states and nation states when schools now serve increasing numbers of immigrant and refugee children. Historically, nation states have developed from cosmopolitanism, and some nations like the U.S. have developed from immigration. Kant’s theory of global citizens and Hegel’s (1991) critique of the authority of the nation state developed when nation states were emerging out of cosmopolitanism. Kant’s (2006) conception of cosmopolitanism, particularly as embodied in his 1795 treatise Perpetual Peace, is grounded in some ways in the political philosophy of the Roman Stoics’ notion of the world citizen and the belief that one’s humanity was a function of reason and that this universal human attribute granted each person the equal status of rational moral agent. Here, the world citizen represented the individual as inhabiting both a local and a universal community. The Stoics regarded the latter as the community of human argument and aspiration as the prime source of moral and social obligations. Hegel (1991) provides a critique of the shortcomings of Kant’s view of cosmopolitanism, as well as subsequent cosmopolitan thought more absolute in its provision for an actual world republic. Hegel’s critique of cosmopolitanism hinges on the issue of whether a world republic or federation of nations would in any authentic sense constitute a community. The presence of such a community is central to Hegel’s understanding of the legitimacy of rule. According to Hegel (1991), the nation state alone satisfies such a role and is therefore the sole authority capable of ruling in accordance with the cultural and social values particular to a nation. Today, however, we must also consider changing internal demographics and internal cosmopolitanism within nation states due to global population migrations and refugees (Uljens and Ylimaki, 2017).
In the case of Germany and the U.S., building a public education to form a nation state is complicated, given that education is a state-based or federalist system. Today, neoliberal policies and discourses have also shaped the ways in which the public sector operates in a global market. Many of these challenges and tensions are not entirely new, but their global dimension and magnitude suggest that the notion of public education, guaranteed for all, is contested in new ways. Public education finds itself at crossroads of increasing privatization and marketization from neoliberal policies, and increasing religious, cultural and linguistic diversity as well as varying concepts of citizenship and new nationalist discourses. Only recently, in spring 2020, nation states across the globe faced the challenge of virtual education and temporarily moving education to home settings as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic – thus reopening debates about access to education, equity in education and the role of public education in modern societies.
The dialogue among paper authors and other presenters was initiated at a public symposium on Public education at the crossroads hosted by the DIPF | Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education, the German Center for Research and Innovation, and the University Alliance Ruhr on the United Nations Plaza in New York, in April 2018. Presenters at the symposium discussed the historical relationship between public education and democracy and what measures are needed to better adapt schools to the 21st century with regard to the various challenges and ways public education reflects ideas of citizenship. The session included different perspectives on contemporary challenges, including student perspectives as well as nation state perspectives in the contemporary, increasingly diverse and global environment.
Characteristics of the education systems in the U.S. and Germany and tensions between public and private schooling
The U.S. and Germany both have a federal school system, and political decisions on schooling are based at the state level. Alba and Foner (2015), nevertheless, point to the varying degr
ee of decentralization in the U.S. and Germany, with the U.S. representing a particularly decentralized school system, in their opinion, due to the strong influence on local preconditions at each school with regard to school funding and student partition. Germany, on the other hand, implemented a council of education ministers, the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs (KMK), in 1948 to reach at least a certain degree of coordination with regard to education policies.
In the European Union (EU), the topic of education and vocational training is subject to the principle of subsidiarity and falls into the category of being supported by the EU. More specifically, in this policy field the EU is asked ‘to carry out actions to support, coordinate or supplement the actions of the Member States’ (EU, 2012). And while legally binding decision-making rests in the power of each of the member states or – as in Germany – is further distributed to the federal level, EU recommendations can have a noticeable and important influence on educational policies in the member states (e.g. Lawn and Grek, 2012; Parreira do Amaral, 2015). Many EU projects and programs aim at harmonizing educational measures or reforms within the EU (Jornitz and Wilmers, 2018; Martens et al., 2014). At the same time, the growing importance of international large-scale assessments in education, such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) run by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), have increasingly influenced education standards and practices in nation states, including federal education systems like Germany and the U.S.
As a federalist education system, the U.S. follows the most common organizational model for education in European and Northern American countries with a single structure for elementary education (grade 1–6) and secondary education (grades 7–9, 10–12 ), whereas Germany runs a differentiated system for secondary education. After completion of elementary education at the end of grade 4, German students follow distinct educational pathways leading to different levels of certification with only the Gymnasium (or the Gymnasiale Oberstufe) qualifying students to take up university studies after the successful completion of grade 12 or 13. Thus, the German system reflects a relatively strict and early separation of the student body whereas in the U.S., high schools tracking only exists to a certain degree within the high school system and is therefore less consequential for the students’ later career choices.
Despite a growing pressure for privatization from neoliberal policies worldwide, and growing challenges as well as continuous public critiques (cf. Hogan and Thompson, 2021; Swail, 2015), public education remains the primary model for formal education in many countries, including the U.S. and Germany. In the U.S., 91{0841e0d75c8d746db04d650b1305ad3fcafc778b501ea82c6d7687ee4903b11a} of children attend public schools (National Center for Education Statistics, 2018) and equally in Germany, in the school year of 2018–2019, approximately 91{0841e0d75c8d746db04d650b1305ad3fcafc778b501ea82c6d7687ee4903b11a} of all children who went to a school of general education were enrolled in a public school (Statistisches Bundesamt, 2019). Since 1992, in Germany, the percentage of students in private schools has almost doubled, but this is mostly due to the foundation of new private schools in the Eastern German states after the reunification: from 0.9{0841e0d75c8d746db04d650b1305ad3fcafc778b501ea82c6d7687ee4903b11a} in 1992 to 9.9{0841e0d75c8d746db04d650b1305ad3fcafc778b501ea82c6d7687ee4903b11a} in 2016; whereas the rate was at 6.1{0841e0d75c8d746db04d650b1305ad3fcafc778b501ea82c6d7687ee4903b11a} in 1992 and 8.8{0841e0d75c8d746db04d650b1305ad3fcafc778b501ea82c6d7687ee4903b11a} in 2016 in the Western German states (Autorengruppe Bildungsberichterstattung, 2018: 44; Klemm et al., 2018: 9). It should be noted that private schools in the U.S. and Germany run on different funding schemes. While private schools in Germany are still (co-)funded and controlled by the state if these schools offer the same educational programs and lead to the same certificates as public schools do, historically, this has not been the case in the U.S. (Frey and Cortina, 2013: 73; cf. Kraul, 2015 on private schools in Germany). U.S. private schools are typically funded by a combination of tuition fees, donations and endowments.
The legitimacy of public schools was further strengthened by a recent study in Germany showing that there are only very small differences between the learning achievements at private and public schools if taking into account that the student body differs at private schools with regard to relevant characteristics: the socioeconomic status of the parents, the language spoken in the student’s family and the student’s sex. This differentiation is significant as the student body at private schools in Germany demonstrates a higher socioeconomic background, a higher percentage of female students and a lower percentage of students with a migrant background (Klemm et al., 2018: 37–40). The study formed student pairs with identical background criteria and did not find any differences in most cases except for the field of listening (Zuhören) in German and comprehension (Hörverstehen) in English. And even in these domains, the biggest measurable difference between students from public and private schools was still within the range of differences between public schools from different German states. Why there was a difference at all is not clear, according to the authors, but they argue that this may be related to better access to out-of-school activities and travel experiences that foster these competencies, rather than to school differences (Klemm et al., 2018: 50–51).
Likewise, a recent U.S. longitudinal study (Pianta and Ansari, 2018) examined the extent to which attending private schools predicts achievement at age 15 and found no advantage for children who attend private schools. The study tracked a sample of American children (n = 1097) longitudinally and examined the extent to which enrollment in private schools between kindergarten and 9th grade was related to students’ academic, social, psychological and attainment outcomes at age 15. According to results for unadjusted models, children with a history of enrollment in private schools performed better on nearly all outcomes assessed in adolescence. However, by simply controlling for the sociodemographic characteristics that selected children and families into these schools, all the advantages of private school education were eliminated. There was also no evidence to suggest that low-income children or children enrolled in urban schools benefited more from private school enrollment.
Yet as Steiner-Khamsi (2016) pointed out, in spite of this situation, changes in the public sector cleared the way for the private sector to expand. In particular, the centralized standards-based education reform combined with an outcomes orientation and international testing of 21st-century skills allowed a huge market for a global education industry to work transnationally (on the various facets of the global education industry, see Parreira do Amaral and Fossum, 2021). We also see a new relationship between public education and increasingly influential transnational institutions, systems and organizations (e.g. OECD). And when we consider that public education is historically connected to nation-building processes and citizenship development in Germany, the U.S. and elsewhere, policymakers and educators are working with perennial tensions or debates in new and complex ways.
Introduction to contemporary debates discussed in this special issue
In the next section, we introduce two major contemporary debates considered throughout papers in the special issue: namely, ideas of citiz
enship education and some of the implications of migration for education.
Citizenship education
Citizenship and citizenship education are two of the oldest ideas in political theory, and with the advent of globalization and population migrations as well as the rise of populism and right-wing parties in many countries, scholars are showing new interest in both ideas. Through every era of recorded history in nation states, these ideas have been presented, supported and contested. Thomas Jefferson’s view, summarized here in his plea for public education, is a distillation of centuries of western writing on the subject – beginning with the Greeks (especially Plato and Aristotle), the Romans (Cicero) and later Enlightenment thinkers who constructed reason, rights and individuals (Locke, Rousseau). This tradition set the precedent for what followed in the U.S. The idea of citizenship is concerned with membership in a political community (e.g. a nation state or state). Who belongs and who does not?
In contemporary U.S. society, citizenship education is also called ‘civic education’ and ‘political education’ although the latter is often avoided outside academia, perhaps because it connotes indoctrination (Shafir, 1998). In schools, citizenship education includes formal coursework on government – not government generally, but U.S. government in particular and, less frequently offered or taken, comparative government (specifically, advanced placement comparative government and politics). Citizenship education also occurs formally in U.S. history courses. These are typically offered in grades 5, 8 and 11. Less formally, citizenship education occurs in democratic school practices such as student council programs or elections to various school offices. In Germany, citizenship education is a subject of its own within the school curriculum – which is an exception rather than the rule in Europe – and is rooted in the idea that totalitarianism, especially in the form of National Socialism, may never gain ground again (see, for example, Abs in this issue; Schulz et al., 2018; and, for Germany, Abs and Hahn-Laudenberg, 2017; vbw, 2020). The subject of citizenship education has not only changed its name occasionally over time in the West German states, but it also varies from state to state as, for example, can be seen in the different names given to ‘teaching’ or ‘studies’ of ‘politics’ (Politikkunde), ‘politics and economics’ (Politik und Wirtschaft), ‘social studies’ (Sozialkunde), ‘political social studies’ or ‘community affairs studies’ (Gemeinschaftskunde). ‘Civic education’ (Staatsbürgerkunde) was the term used in the former German Democratic Republic, which targeted education in politics from a socialist perspective. Even if the overall educational priority of the states’ curricula does not lie within the field of citizenship education, it is nevertheless possible for students to specialize in this subject during the last two years of the Gymnasium. And apart from being taught citizenship education within this frame, usually starting with grade 6, students also encounter citizenship education topics in other subjects with societal relevance such as history or ethical or religious education (contrary to the U.S., the latter is part of the regular public education curriculum in Germany). Similar to the U.S., citizenship education also takes place in a variety of school activities and can be experienced via supplementary activities, such as courses in conflict management.
The question remains: what kinds of democratic political identity and corresponding virtues should schools try to cultivate? Potential answers involve a distinction between different forms of democracy and a consideration of contending forces and interests, each wanting to have a say. Which group(s) of adults can legitimately decide on the particulars of citizenship education in schools? Parents? Professional educators? Citizens? The third issue stems from the conflicts that arise in liberal-democratic regimes over the meaning of patriotism and the tension between majority rule and personal freedom. The founders of the U.S. created a liberal democracy, which guarantees personal freedom and human rights in addition to majority rule. One implication is that parents cannot demand that schools cater to their own ethnic customs, religious beliefs or political ideologies. At least, they cannot demand this if doing so would harm or interfere with or otherwise impact the customs, beliefs and ideologies of other families. Citizenship education is particularly interesting from this liberal perspective not only because it aims to shape children into particular kinds of citizens, but because it also aims to shape them into the kind of people who decide for themselves how they will develop and how they will proceed with new situations when the future is an open question. Accordingly, the teaching of critical thinking and toleration as two hallmarks of ‘good citizenship’ in a liberal democracy has been challenged on the grounds that they might draw children away from their parents’ beliefs or from their (increasingly) pluralistic cultural and ethnic group. We also see the growing presence of neo-nationalist discourses. Should schools be able to interfere in family life in this way, and does liberal-democratic citizenship education demand it? A consideration of the issues will afford a more robust understanding of the politics of citizenship education in the U.S., Germany and elsewhere, particularly in times of rapid changes, such as rising neo-nationalist discourses. As Veugelers (2019) points out, the understanding of citizenship within the concept of citizenship education has broadened throughout the past decades: whereas the 19th century envisioned the integration of citizens in a nation state, today the concept of citizens also refers to the idea of a critical citizen as well as to a citizen with transnational and global connections beyond the nation state. In this context, the question arises of whether nation states should continue to rely on language as a way of building a common or unified notion of citizens. Abs (in this issue) notes that the EU is currently in the process of developing an educational strategy to include citizenship education by 2030. This strategy will likely have implications for nation states as they (re)consider how to build common or unified citizens. Thus, we consider the challenges to citizenship education historically and in the contemporary situation of increasing multiculturalism and multilingualism within nation states and globally in this special issue.
Multilingualism and migration in public schools
Schools in Germany, the U.S. and elsewhere are experiencing religious, cultural and linguistic diversity as an empirical reality. Like the majority of nations in the world, these two countries are multilingual (see, for example, World Languages, 2020), although German is Germany’s official language.1 The U.S. does not have a declared official language; however, most of the U.S. population spoke only English at home in 1930 (U.S. Census Bureau, 1980). Indeed, the most recent U.S. census survey revealed the wide-ranging language diversity of the U.S.; the population of immigrants and U.S. natives speaking a language other than English at home has nearly tripled since 1980 due to immigration from countries where English is not an official language. The U.S. Census Bureau (2010) recorded the use of more than 350 languages.
Migration itself is not new to today’s society. After World War II, Germany experienced several immigration flows starting with immigrants coming from Southern European countries and Turkey from the 1950s onwards, followed by a vast immigration flow after the opening of Eastern European borders, the breakdown of the former Soviet Union, and th
e Balkan wars. Germany is currently experiencing a wave of immigrants coming from war zones outside Europe such as Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2016, 23{0841e0d75c8d746db04d650b1305ad3fcafc778b501ea82c6d7687ee4903b11a} of the population in Germany had a migrant background.2 The highest percentage of new arrivals – with the majority being under 25 years old – came from Asian and Middle Eastern countries struggling with civil wars and instability. Another broad proportion of people are coming from countries within the EU, specifically Romania, Croatia, Bulgaria and Poland (Autorengruppe Bildungsberichterstattung, 2018: 26.). Although the majority of migrant students are still enrolled in schools offering lower degrees, migration rates for German Gymnasiums have also risen: while only 14{0841e0d75c8d746db04d650b1305ad3fcafc778b501ea82c6d7687ee4903b11a} of all German Gymnasiums had more than 25{0841e0d75c8d746db04d650b1305ad3fcafc778b501ea82c6d7687ee4903b11a} of students with a migration background in 2000, this figure has now risen to 36{0841e0d75c8d746db04d650b1305ad3fcafc778b501ea82c6d7687ee4903b11a} (Autorengruppe Bildungsberichterstattung, 2018: 93). Researchers link the unequal partition of migrant and non-migrant students within the school system primarily to the socioeconomic family background of the students and language competencies in German (Autorengruppe Bildungsberichterstattung, 2016: 204; see also Stanat et al., 2010). Research on multilingualism refers to the complexity of students’ language backgrounds and points to the fact that many students with a migrant background speak more than one language at home. This ‘differentiated use of languages’ (Gogolin and Maaz, 2019: 6) seems to be determined by different types of communication;, for example, who a student is talking to, and about what kind of topics (Gogolin and Maaz, 2019: 6; Rauch, 2019).
From its earliest days, the U.S. has been a nation of immigrants, with the exception of its original indigenous inhabitants. A large share of immigrants came to the U.S. seeking economic opportunities and/or religious freedom. Of course, there were also many individuals who entered the U.S. as indentured servants and, involuntarily, as slaves. Another major wave of immigration occurred from around 1815 to 1865 with the majority coming from Northern and Western Europe. Also in the 19th century, the United States received some five million German immigrants. In the national census of 2000, more Americans claimed German ancestry than any other group. During the 1800s, a significant number of Asian immigrants settled in the U.S., primarily in the West, lured by news of the California Gold Rush. This influx of diverse populations resulted in anti-immigrant sentiment among certain factions of America’s predominantly Anglo-Saxon Protestant population as evidenced in federal legislation restricting immigration; that is, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (Lee, 2003) which banned Chinese laborers from coming to America. Californians pushed for the new law, blaming the Chinese, who were willing to work for less money, which led to a decline in wages.
For much of the 1800s, the federal government had left immigration policy to individual states. However, by the 1890s, the government decided it needed to step in to handle the ever-increasing influx of newcomers. Between 1880 and 1920, a time of rapid industrialization and urbanization, America received more than 20 million immigrants. Beginning in the 1890s, the majority of arrivals were from Central Eastern and Southern Europe. Immigration plummeted between the Great Depression and World War II. After World War II, the U.S. passed special legislation enabling refugees from Europe and the Soviet Union to enter the U.S.. Today, in the wake of neoliberal policies, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (1994), the majority of the U.S. immigrants come from Asia and Latin America rather than Europe. With regard to public education, in the school year 2015–2016, the graduation rate for public high school students was 84{0841e0d75c8d746db04d650b1305ad3fcafc778b501ea82c6d7687ee4903b11a}, the highest it has been since the rate was first measured in 2010–2011. Asian/Pacific Islander students had the highest graduation rate (91{0841e0d75c8d746db04d650b1305ad3fcafc778b501ea82c6d7687ee4903b11a}), followed by White (88{0841e0d75c8d746db04d650b1305ad3fcafc778b501ea82c6d7687ee4903b11a}), Hispanic (79{0841e0d75c8d746db04d650b1305ad3fcafc778b501ea82c6d7687ee4903b11a}), Black (76{0841e0d75c8d746db04d650b1305ad3fcafc778b501ea82c6d7687ee4903b11a}) and American Indian/Alaska Native (72{0841e0d75c8d746db04d650b1305ad3fcafc778b501ea82c6d7687ee4903b11a}) students.
In a study of immigration and integration of migrant students in the public education systems of six industrialized countries, including the U.S. and Germany, the authors found both the U.S. and the German school system highly challenging for second-generation migrant students of low-income families and pointed to strong disparities between the learning achievements of the second-generation migrants and the native-born population (Alba and Foner, 2015). And this is despite the fact that some migrant groups with a higher socioeconomic background – for example, from China in the U.S. – do well in school. In the German case, the authors link this result to the highly stratified school system that tracks students at a very early age. In the case of the U.S., the authors see the most important factors in the inequality among schools as funding, the selection of less qualified teachers for schools with less funding, and the residential and racial segregation of the student population. Apart from these main factors, the authors also point to the unfavorable circumstances of relatively short school days in Germany, and a relatively short school year in the U.S. In this comparison, it is also interesting to take a look at the Canadian example: Canada is set apart from the U.S. and Germany as well as the other countries under observation as second-generation immigrants are more successful in the Canadian school system. But Alba and Foner (2015, chap. 8) see the main reason for this as not a generally more successful Canadian school system, but a very different immigration system that privileges the entrance of immigrants with higher educational and occupational qualifications.
We can also observe differences in immigration and migration policies as they affect public student outcomes of migrant students in Germany and the U.S.. Across these distinctions, we can see the tensions between concepts of common national aims through education and increasing population diversity across particular cultural and national backgrounds. Such challenges of diversity due to internal demographic shifts and internal cosmopolitanism from global population migrations and refugees have direct implications for ideas of citizenship and the role of education in forming citizens in Germany, the U.S. and elsewhere. Challenges to public education in the development of nation state or region state (European) citizens, then, center on tensions concerning increasing national diversity along with pressures to perform well on common global accountability measures.
Introduction to the papers in this special issue
The articles in this special issue circle around the main themes from various perspectives, using different examples. The article ‘Historical perspectives and contemporary challenges to education (Bildung) and citizenry in the modern nation state: Comparative perspectives on Germany and the USA’ asks for the relation between nation-building, public education, identity-building processes and transnational connections between educational discourses from Germany and the U.S.. It presents historical foundations of public education including transnational discourses on public education over time, its setting in federal nation states and its positioning bet
ween international commitments and international benchmarks in a world that is increasingly global, but also faces new forms of nationalism. The question is therefore located within multi-levels of states, nation states, and transnational levels, such as the European level or the role of supranational organizations.
Next, we consider the notion of education itself in Norm Friesen’s article that highlights the concept of personal and political development and emancipation in Mollenhauer’s (2013) Forgotten Connections. Friesen relates this to both the public and the private spheres of education in considering how Mollenhauer theorizes education in Germany amidst the political influences of the 1960s, yet clearly draws on understandings of education from the German intellectual heritage with its reciprocal influences on the U.S. within North American education. In so doing, Friesen’s article provides a foundational understanding of the meaning and language of education to inform perennial and contemporary challenges and debates highlighted in this special issue.
The subsequent two articles highlight multilingualism and active democratic citizenship as well as the choices public schools have to take to address the changing needs of the student population. Ingrid Gogolin demonstrates the linkage between monolingualism and the concept of nation states as they developed over time and contrasts this to the current situation in Germany; while Jill Koyama, referring to a case study from the U.S., points to the implications that western ideas of citizenship and sovereignty have for migrant students. Specifically, Gogolin’s article illustrates the role of a national language, also called mother tongue, as a core element of an education system for citizenship education in Germany, one that has become a general model of many systems worldwide.3 Koyama’s article illustrates the challenges of this general model amidst an increasing population of migrant students and refugees in the U.S., a nation state that, as noted earlier, does not have an official language yet has identified English as a de facto mother tongue in terms of citizenship and education policies.
The final article, by Hermann Josef Abs, considers public education at the crossroads in terms of European notions of citizenship education. Further, this concluding article presents the tools and strategic options for policymaking of two organizations (i.e. Council of Europe and the EU) in the area of citizenship education, especially with regard to current global, political and education-specific challenges in the field. In so doing, the final article opens an ongoing dialogue about public education amidst the contemporary situation of nation states within globalization, climate change, digitalization and the growing level of social divisions.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
ORCID iD
Annika Wilmers 
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1543-5571
Notes
1.
See Gogolin in this issue about multilingualism in Germany and the lack of statistics about multilingualism in the German states for the past decades.
2.
With a higher percentage for school children: 0–6 years at 38{0841e0d75c8d746db04d650b1305ad3fcafc778b501ea82c6d7687ee4903b11a}, 6–10 years at 37{0841e0d75c8d746db04d650b1305ad3fcafc778b501ea82c6d7687ee4903b11a}, 10–15 years at 34{0841e0d75c8d746db04d650b1305ad3fcafc778b501ea82c6d7687ee4903b11a} and 15–20 years at 30{0841e0d75c8d746db04d650b1305ad3fcafc778b501ea82c6d7687ee4903b11a}; and with geographical variations: prior to 2018, 96{0841e0d75c8d746db04d650b1305ad3fcafc778b501ea82c6d7687ee4903b11a} of all people with a migrant background lived in Berlin or the states of the former West Germany (Autorengruppe Bildungsberichterstattung, 2018: 26).
3.
This applies to education systems in ‘classical’ nation states. Education systems in so-called new nation states – for example, in previously colonized regions – are usually not oriented to this concept. See, for example, Alexander and Mohanty (2013).
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Annika Wilmers is senior researcher at the DIPF | Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education. She is involved in projects in the fields of migration, digitization and the history of educational discourses, reforms and policies applying methodology from a transnational or international comparative perspective and review methodology. As a staff member of “International Cooperation in Education” Dr. Wilmers concentrates on linking German educational research with international research communities. Most recently, she has been engaged in international research projects with a transatlantic perspective, as well as working for OECD and EU projects, particularly in the field of evidence-informed education policy and practice. Recent publications include International Perspectives on School Settings, Education Policy and Digital Strategies. A Transatlantic Discourse in Education Research (Barbara Budrich Verlag; coedited with Sieglinde Jornitz) and Bildung im digitalen Wandel. Die Bedeutung für das pädagogische Personal und für die Aus- und Fortbildung (Waxmann Verlag).
Rose M. Ylimaki is the Del and Jewell Lewis Endowed Chair in the Department of Educational Leadership in the College of Education at Northern Arizona University. Dr. Ylimaki brings her knowledge of education, complex education ideologies, policies and practices at international, national, and local (community and school) levels to administrative audiences. Dr. Ylimaki also studies leadership in schools with underserved populations as part of two international studies of school leadership, the International Successful School Principalship Project and the International School Leadership Development Network. She developed a school development project called the Arizona Initiative for Leadership Development and Research (AZiLDR), a school improvement project for high-needs schools across Arizona, based upon research from the international projects and a commitment to equity and social justice. Her journal articles appear in Educational Administration Quarterly, Journal of School Leadership, Journal of Educational Administration, and the American Educational Research Journal among others. Her research also appears in books, including Critical curriculum leadership: A framework for progressive education (Routledge), US and cross-national policies, practices and preparation: Implications for successful instructional leadership, organizational learning, and culturally responsive practices (Springer), Bridging educational leadership, curriculum theory, and Didaktik: A non-affirmative theory of education (Springer), and Evidence-Based School Development in Changing Demographic Contexts (forthcoming, Springer).