The surprise about the performance of students in PISA 2000 in Germany is titled with an own phrase called “PISA –Schock”. Compared to other states, not only the moderate competencies of Germany’s students exited attention, but also the strong relation between social background and success in education system. The study revealed that students who had parents  belonging to the highest socio-economic status groups had a three times greater relative probability to attend the academic track, Gymnasium, instead of intermediate track, than students with parents belonging to lowest socio-economic status groups (Deutsches PISA-Konsotium 2001). In the “after-PISA era” this inequality of chances has been the major topic in school policy and educational research. The Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs of the Länder in the Federal Republic of Germany (Kultusministerkonferenz der Länder, KMK) increased their engagement in quality development and quality assurance in schools (KMK 1997). In the year 2006 they adopted a comprehensive strategy for educational monitoring. This strategy includes a regular joint educational reporting by the Federation and the Länder (recently published Autorengruppe Bildungsberichterstattung 2014). Both Large scale assessments and other monitoring activities of the Länder, among others, produce knowledge about student´s achievements and inequality in education systems, based on a sample of relevant indicators. Theoretically these instruments (supported by the german states) mainly focus on inequalities on specific output-variables while conceptualizing educational systems with a simple context-input-process-output model.

In contrast to this approach our purpose is to put educational justice instead of inequalities in educational outputs in the foreground of monitoring systems. We seek to introduce our concept of monitoring by answering these questions: 1) Which theories are appropriate and useful in order to describe the justice of educational systems? 2) How can justice be analyzed empirically? 3) How valid and reliable are those conceptual and methodological determinations?

Further we have intended to analyze the justice of German school systems in a comprehensive way. For that reason we developed an instrument for defining what justice of opportunities theoretically can mean (question 1). The normative concept is based on both common theories of justice (Rawls 1979; Sen 2010; Honneth 2011) and contributions about the social functions of (ecuational) systems (Fend 2006; Parsons 1967). Subsequent to the theoreticall framework the speakers give a brief summary of some results from the recently published report (Berkemeyer et al. 2014) with a special attention on indicators addressing transition issues (question 2). For this purpose data from official statistics was analyzed to compare the results of the different German Länder relating to four deduced dimensions of educational systems.

According to our experience with the three previous publications it is time for a critical review of function, validity and conceptional construction of the Chancenspiegel under conditions of institutional change in educational systems (question 3). A special point of interest it is to consider the question, whether the instrument appropriates our own requirements and requirements for educational reporting, in particularly regarding of the theoretical framework and the empirically execution. Therefore we focus on the following issues:

• What are the central goals of this educational reporting instrument (and in difference to other education monitoring reports)? How far can they be reached?
• Is the set of indicators adequate to actualize the goals of the report, especially under conditions of institutional change (e.g. the organization of school types and courses of education)?
• Considering the fact that we compare partly very different school systems of the Länder: What kind of knowledge is provided by monitoring instruments which compare different institutionalized cases? Against this background: Which conclusions can be drawn about the justice of educational systems?

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