The primary purpose of the reform of German orthography in 1996 was to simplify writing. Has this effort been successful? Criticism and discomfort regarding writing culture have been frequently expressed since the spelling reform, but have only sporadically been compared with empirical findings. Particularly from the field of orthography, school performance data rarely reach the interested public. This study therefore attempts to find answers to two questions in a pre-post comparison: What orthographic skills did secondary school students possess before and after the turning point of 1996? And: What is the relationship between changed spelling norms as input for orthography instruction and spelling performance as its output?.