Excerpt:
The problem: many parents who want to enable their children to have a good start, send them to Volksschulen with a low proportion of foreigners. This is the verdict of a current short study of the So lautet das Fazit einer aktuellen Kurzstudie des Sachverständigenrats deutscher Stiftungen für Integration und Migration (SVR).
In Berlin around one third of the immigrant elementary school pupils go to schools in which most of their fellow pupils are of foreign origin, according to the study. Six out of every seven German schoolchildren, by contrast, attend schools with a majority of pupils of German origin. According to the study, this is only partly explained by the fact that more immigrant families live in certain districts than in others. It is also the choice of school by the parents that heightens the social divide. As, although in most German federal states, the school is allocated by the authorities, the parents can set it aside.
For the study SVR analysed data from 108 Berlin elementary schools and analysed the corresponding residential districts. Result: in one out of five the proportion of foreigners is twice as high as that of children in the district. In other words: more German children should be attending these schools. Conversely, the proportion of German children in 1 out of every 4 elementary schools is higher than it statistically should be. Parents often avoid schools with a high proportion of immigrants because they associate them with poor learning opportunities and problematic environments.