FoDiRa-Project: Racist discrimination in schools

In Germany, children and adolescents from immigrant families are disadvantaged in terms of their educational success. They participate less often in early childhood education, they acquire lower school competencies on average and achieve lower secondary school qualifications than members of the majority group (Autorengruppe Bildungsberichterstattung 2020, Henschel et al. 2019). One factor that may contribute to these educational disadvantages is racial discrimination based on ethnicity or religion. Our research project investigates whether ethnic or religious minority students are systematically disadvantaged at school by teachers evaluating their performance less favourably when it is objectively not different. In the first module, we analyse representative data from multiple grades and cohorts in German schools to examine long-term trends and dynamic effects of discrimination. For a comprehensive overview of the phenomenon, the second module is conducting a broad meta-analysis of previous studies on evaluation disparities in the German context, including both experimental and field studies. This will allow for an assessment of the extent to which the study design is responsible for the heterogeneous state of research on discrimination which emerges from previous studies. Furthermore, we expect this approach to indicate relevant contextual influences. The third module focuses on the underlying processes in the classroom by using video analysis to investigate whether teachers’ behaviour differs towards children from different ethnic backgrounds. The project’s main goal is to better understand the extent to which racial discrimination contributes to the educational disadvantages of children and adolescents from immigrant families.