For school types with more than one educational track, many federal states in Germany now provide only a general legal framework concerning performance-based differentiation and delegate its concrete design to the individual school. As a result, the much-used category “school type” is losing descriptive and analytical value. The present article takes up this development. It systematically compares the German states’ school structures at the level of organizational forms and reflects on the implications that the inclusion of differentiation issues in school autonomy has for official school statistics and educational research.

Keywords
school structure, performance differentiation, school organization, school law, school autonomy