This book deals with one the most contentious issues for Britain and Germany in the postwar era: namely the organization of primary and secondary stages in state general education systems. It is centered on an empirical puzzle. The current education systems in Britain and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) are frequently viewed as contrasting organizational types, yet both countries began the postwar period with similar 'tripartite' systems of separate schools in which pupils were selected at age ten or eleven for placement in separate schools that varied in prestige. In the 1960s and 1970s, center-left governments in Britain and the FRG sought to reform these systems, but only the British achieved significant change by largely replacing the tripartite system with the comprehensive school model, while Germany retained its selective and highly differentiated school system. What explains change in Britain and continuity in the FRG? weiterlesen