The Regional Educational Landscape. Improving the Quality of Schools and Teaching in State and Municipal Communities of Responsibility

Duration: 2007-2009

Project leader: Prof. Dr. Katharina Maag Merki

Project partner: Prof. Dr. Hans-Georg Kotthoff, University of Teacher Education Freiburg/Brsg.

The German state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, together with the Bertelsmann Foundation, launched two regional pilot projects in Freiburg und Ravensburg entitled “The Regional Educational Landscape. Improving the Quality of Schools and Teaching in State and Municipal Communities of Responsibility”. These projects are aimed at developing and testing steering instruments and at pooling resources at the regional level to foster the effectiveness and efficiency of educational regions in supporting schools’ efforts at quality development and thereby improving students’ educational opportunities. This requires that all those involved improve and in some cases systematically intensify existing forms of cooperation in a way that is transparent for all the actors in the educational region. The Baden-Wuerttemberg Ministry of Culture and Education commissioned a supplementary scientific study to evaluate the project’s processes and impacts with reference to a theoretical model of educational governance research. To this end, standardized questionnaires were distributed to all school administrators at the project schools in the two educational regions of Freiburg and Ravensburg (N=108) and to all teachers at 35 schools selected according to specific criteria (N=580). In addition, “expert hearings” were held and the four schools were analyzed as a contrastive case study.

Detailed project description in German (PDF, 93 KB)

Publications (in German)

• Emmerich, M. (2010). Regionalisierung und Schulentwicklung: Bildungsregionen als Modernisierungsansätze im Bildungssektor (S. 355-375). In H. Altrichter & K. Maag Merki (Hrsg.), Handbuch Neue Steuerung im Schulsystem. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.
• Emmerich, M., Maag Merki, K., & Kotthoff, H.-G. (2009). Bildungsregion Freiburg und Ravensburg als Motor der Qualitätsentwicklung in der Einzelschule (S. 156-166). In K. Maag Merki (Hrsg.), Kooperation und Netzwerkbildung. Strategien zur Qualitätsentwicklung in Einzelschulen. Seelze: Klett-Kallmeyer.
• Maag Merki, K., Emmerich, M. & Kotthoff, H.-G. (2008). Schulen in regionalen Bildungslandschaften. Erfahrungen in den Regionen Freiburg und Ravensburg. Pädagogik 60(7-8), 36-39.