Educational Equity and “the Spirit of Berlin”

Speaking in Berlin last week President Obama recalled John F. Kennedy's "ich bin ein Berliner" speech, delivered 50 years ago today. Obama asked Germans and Americans to consider the meaning for our present world of Kennedy's call for "peace with justice, beyond yourselves and ourselves to all mankind." What was remarkable about Kennedy's charge was that it "lifted the eyes" of his audience above the precarious reality of life in Cold War Berlin, universalizing their cause as a fight for freedom everywhere. It is that universal message of hope and freedom that makes Kennedy's words as resonant when quoted by Obama today as they were when first delivered.

Obama did not mention that this year is also the 100th anniversary of the birth of Willy Brandt (1913-1992), the mayor of West Berlin who hosted Kennedy and who would later serve as Chancellor of West Germany and receive the 1971 Nobel Peace Prize. Visiting Brandt's northern German hometown of Lübeck this week with the Marshall Memorial Fellowship, my colleagues and I participated in a ceremony that marked the occasion by placing a plaque on his childhood home. As I listened to Lübeckers commemorate this remarkable son of their city I reflected on the lessons of his life story for our generation and the connection to the Kennedy-Obama Berlin moment.

Kennedy opened his famous speech with a tribute to Brandt, "who has symbolized throughout the world the fighting spirit of West Berlin." Kennedy was referring to Brandt's defiance in the face of Soviet intimidation and the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. But Brandt was a fighter in more ways than one. A committed social democrat, at age 19 he fled Nazi Germany for asylum in Scandinavia. From exile, Brandt wrote articles and books in opposition to the Nazi regime and even covertly returned to Berlin in 1936, under cover as a Norwegian student, to participate in the resistance.

Already in his Hanseatic youth, Brandt showed early signs of that "fighting spirit". Born Herbert Frahm (he would change his name to avoid arrest by the Nazis) to an unmarried cashier in the working class St. Lorenz neighborhood of Lübeck, he never met his father. He managed nevertheless to earn a scholarship to attend Lübeck's oldest and most elite school, the Johanneum. His diploma is on display at the Willy Brandt Haus in the city center.

Students at the present-day Johanneum performed at the ceremony we attended, honoring this famous alumnus of their school. Talking to the students and education leaders in Lübeck I learned that if Brandt were born today, it's unlikely he would get into an elite Gymnasium like the Johanneum. While nearly one third of Lübeck children live in low-income households, only 14 percent of Gymnasium students come from these families. Similarly, over a quarter of Lübeckers under the age of 25 come from "migration backgrounds." In the Gymnasium classroom I visited, however, there were only two students of migration backgrounds – and they were the children of an Italian doctor and a Chinese business executive. There were no students of Turkish origin, no Arabs, and no Africans.

As an American, this predicament is familiar. This is an achievement gap, a concept that has been part of our education policy debates since the 1980s. In Germany discussion of educational equity began in earnest in 2001, when the country underwent a "PISA shock" that revealed its educational system to be one of the most inequitable in the developed world. Since then, Germany has made strides in overcoming its inequities, thanks largely to investments in early childhood education, but its achievement gaps remain some of the largest in the OECD.

At the classroom I visited in Lübeck, the students recognized it was unfair that there were so few minority and low-income students in top schools like theirs – but they didn't believe they could do anything about it.

As President Obama said at the Brandenburg Gate, though, "complacency is not the character of great nations". Germans and Americans alike "need the same fighting spirit that defined Berlin a half-century ago" to break down the religious, social, and economic walls that divide our societies. The work of uniting people continues – that is "the spirit of Berlin."

I hope those students in Lübeck were listening.

In this century, when Europe and the US no longer face a common existential threat from the outside, the shared work of overcoming our internal divisions is, for me, the most important basis for the transatlantic relationship. "Peace with justice begins with the example we set here at home," said the president.

As the enabler of success in career and life, educational cooperation should be the first priority in this new transatlanticism. We usually think of education as domestic, but if our problems are similar why shouldn't we learn from one another about how to solve them? Why do European and American militaries cooperate so much more than our education departments? Why don't we have a NATO for education – dedicated to fighting for equity and excellence around the world?

A generation ago Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik created a new opening for relations between the east and west. His legacy, today, points the way to a new kind of relationship between Europe and the US.