RIGHTS-GERMANY: Immigrant Children Fall Through the Education Net

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Yojana Sharma

BERLIN, Dec 12 2001 (IPS) - Immigrant children in Germany are less likely than their peer group in other industrialised countries to improve their prospects through education.

A study of 32 countries has shown that success in school is linked to social class more than in any other country in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

This finding has galvanised education ministers from Germany’s 16 states, which are individually responsible for education, into a crisis meeting on the same day (last week) that the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) study was released.

The study involving 265,000 fifteen-year olds in 32 countries ranks countries according to the pupils’ comprehension and application skills in reading, mathematics and sciences.

Germany ranked well below the OECD average in all measures – 25 out of 32 countries in reading literacy, 22nd in mathematical and 23rd in science literacy. Even more striking was the disparity between the top and the bottom achievers.

“There is a huge gap between high achievers and underachievers, no other country’s is so big,” says Andreas Schleicher, PISA coordinator at the OECD’s headquarters in Paris.

The massive tail of underachievement is due mainly to under- performance of children from immigrant backgrounds.

“These foreign students are not integrated into the education system,” Schleicher says. And the Berliner Zeitung newspaper commented: “once a foreigner, always a foreigner”.

A visit to a secondary school in Berlin’s Neukoelln district with large numbers of Turkish immigrants shows up the problem quite clearly.

“We can’t yet tackle verbal problems in mathematics,” says maths teacher Reinhard Heinz, of his 7th grade class of 12-13 year olds at the Otto Hahn School. “Its not because they can’t work out the answers, its because they just wouldn’t understand them.” Their grasp of German was simply inadequate, Heinz says.

Some 55 percent of the class comes from an immigrant background, mostly Turkish. But worse, Ernst Guenter Freder the school’s head teacher says even third or fourth generation immigrants speak worse German than their parents.

Most of the pupils at Otto Hahn School have had little or no remedial teaching during their primary school years to offset this.

“The assumption that the educational, professional and linguistic problems of young immigrants solve themselves the longer they remain in the country has been clearly disproved,” says Marieluise Beck, the government’s commissioner for foreigners’ affairs in a recently published paper.

According to the OECD, Students from privileged backgrounds tend to perform better in all countries but differences are less pronounced in some countries than in others.

High performing countries such as Finland, Iceland, Japan and Korea have homogenous populations but countries of high immigration like Canada showed above average levels of reading literacy and a below average impact of social background on student performance. In Germany it is the other way around.

As many as 23 percent of 15-year olds in Germany were unable to understand meaning from a simple text, the lowest level in reading literacy measured by the OECD.

By contrast the percentage of underachievers was nine percent in Canada, and 12 percent in Australia, where the OECD study notes that neither a student’s birthplace or the birthplace of his or parents seems generally to influence performance in reading, mathematical and scientific literacy.

“We knew we were not doing well,” says Willi Lemke, education senator for Bremen, a city with large numbers of immigrants. “But what we did not know was that other countries were doing so much better than us.”

The OECD says that if Germany were able to raise mean scores of minority-language speakers to the same level of majority-language speakers the national mean score in Germany would be above the OECD average in mathematical literacy rather than 10 points below it.

“Despite 40 years of immigration, German schools are essentially mono-cultural and have provided few answers to the problems of immigrant children,” says Ozclan Mutlu, Green party spokesperson for Education in the Berlin senate and himself a Turk. “There is little in the way of curriculum, books or teacher training to redress the problems.”

Studies show that one in four pupils of non-German extraction leaves school with no qualifications, compared to one in ten German children.

“Those who fell through the education net are now parents and their children have grown up in an atmosphere of unemployment and hopelessness.

Now the third generation sees that going to school does little to help them get a job, so they say why bother. They have lost faith in the system completely,” says Mutlu.

“We compared the same immigrant groups, such as Turks in different countries. Compared to similar immigrant groups in Sweden and Norway, the results were quite clear – in Sweden the same immigrant groups are doing better than in Germany,” says Petra Stanat, PISA project manager at the Max Planck Institute for Human Resources in Berlin.

The institute carried out the German study for the OECD.

Unlike Scandinavian countries, Canada, Australia and Britain special language courses for pupils whose mother tongue is different from the language of instruction are few and far between in Germany. And because of a late start at school between ages six and seven is the norm, compared to early schooling in Britain and widely available state-funded kindergartens and creches in France, many immigrant children begin school barely able to follow lessons.

“By the time children come to school, it is almost too late for them to learn German,” says Klaus Boeger, Education senator for Berlin. Education ministers want more resources for pre-school programmes where immigrant children will learn by immersion.

Problems that become apparent at the beginning of primary education are compounded by Germany’s system of early selection at age 10, after only four years of primary schooling when pupils are sorted into Hauptschulen or remedial schools, vocational Realschulen and academic Gymnasien or Grammar schools.

Immigrant pupils are shown to be less likely than German pupils to achieve a place at a grammar school, and are over-represented in the country’s remedial schools. One in four pupils of non- German extraction leaves school with no qualifications, compared to one in ten German children.

In Berlin, the city with the largest number of foreigners, the authorities have proposed to test all incoming first grade pupils for their knowledge of German, a system that is already underway in the state of North Rhine Westfalia.

Tests in September on six year-olds in the working class district of Wedding in Berlin have already shown a huge need for support in German language, a need that is still not being met. More than 75 percent of six-year olds who started school in the district had problems with the language of instruction.

The authorities have done little except to call on immigrant parents to “send their children to Kindergarten” although most pre-schools are not free in Germany, in contrast to universities – a point criticised by the OECD’s Schleicher.

Few believe much will change. State education ministers had to react swiftly to the huge public outcry that accompanied the release of the OECD report. Parents, employers and universities have been complaining about the poor skills of school leavers for years.

Ministers ended their two-day crisis meeting last week with a “seven-point plan” to improve the curriculum of the youngest including starting teaching earlier, training for teachers to more easily identify problems in reading, more support for the weakest, and extra lessons for underachievers.

Pre-schools should concentrate on social skills rather than reading and readiness, thought to contribute to the poor performance of immigrant children in particular.

The prospects of immigrant children may only marginally be improved in the coming years.

The powerful teachers’ union, the Gewerkschaft fuer Erziehung und Wissenschaft (GEW), says it is disappointed that the majority of education ministers are not willing to “seriously deal with” the problems of children from deprived backgrounds.

GEW chairperson Eva Maria Stange says the ministers do not want to tackle the problems of the deprived that would require massive resources.

“With our experience of the past we are sceptical that (ministers) will really change anything. But if the PISA shock doesn’t help, then I don’t know what will,” she says.