White Flight: German Families Abandoning ‘Diverse’ Schools

Families in Germany are switching their children’s schools fearing that large amounts of migrants will ruin their child’s chance at a good education.

According to a detailed report in Sueddeutsche, more and more German families are switching their child’s schooling because of the presence of more and more migrant children who often disrupt class and bully native Germans.

The article tells the story of a typical German family (names have been changed) and a typical German father who like many is eager to prove how tolerant and multicultural he and his family are. His daughter is placed in a school with a majority of the pupils being non Germans.

Yet by the end of his daughters first year in the school the father starts getting concerned the school is giving his daughter special treatment. It is not until he investigates that he realizes she is special because she is the last native German left, the others having one by one transferred to different schools.

The German school system assigns places in schools by location. This method is meant to ensure that within each school district children are able to go to a school close to where they live. The problem has now arisen in neighbourhoods with high migrant populations that more and more parents are transfering their children out of assigned schools because the allocation of resources is going toward things like German language courses and integration and their children are being left out.

German Federal Interior Minister Thomas Maiziere did nothing to calm these fears when back in November he said current school standards would need to be dropped to help integrate more migrants.

Previously only wealthy and gifted children transfered to different schools and only 10 percent of the total pupils would even request a transfer. The trend has been growing in recent years as German school children mirror the ‘white flight’ phenomenon in which native peoples move to escape the migrant fueled transformation of their historical neighbourhoods. One of the effects of the migrant crisis has been to cause rents and property prices to rise in places like Frankfurt and having much the same effect as “white flight.”

“It was a decision of head against heart,” said the father in the story and also told the paper he would be fine for his daughter to go to a more mixed school but not if she was the only German there.

The situation in Britain is very similar and in some areas even more advanced. In 2014 the UK, Ofsted remarked that a rural school in Lincolnshire received a black mark on a performance review because the school was deemed “too white” and argued that the students had a great education but did not have access to enough “diversity.”

A video that came out last year shows the attitudes school age migrants often have toward their native German peers and after viewing makes parents choices to move schools seem much more reasonable. The children in the video say Germans, “eat pig meat. I feel disgusted by them to be honest,” and that if all the native Germans would just disappear, “no one would notice.”