ABSTRACT
For Germany, the emergence of modern international education assessments marks a decisive watershed in education policymaking. Comparative evaluations are central to understanding the encompassing education reforms in Germany since the turn of the millennium, which ended a near 30-year reform deadlock and ultimately led to a paradigm change in Germany. Prior to the mid-1990s, German education policy was not guided by evaluations of achieved outcomes or made with empirical data on performances. Instead, the policy fi eld was characterized by detailed input governance and rather philosophical debates about the purposes of education.
