The Berlin coalition has a problem with the Freedom of Information Act. Contrary to what she wanted, the parents have a right to know what percentage of the students in a school do not speak German at home. This says a report by the scientific service of the House of Representatives, which the AfD faction had commissioned.

The opposition group wanted to know to what extent the coalition parties’ warning of a possible “stigmatization” of an individual school justified keeping such data secret. So far, you can see from the portraits of all schools on the Internet how high the proportion of children is with other native languages. The same applies, for example, to the data on student performance and school distance: All of this data, including the Abitur results, is recorded by the education administration and published annually.

With reference to the Freedom of Information Act, the Scientific Parliamentary Service considers it unjustified to declare such information classified. First, “Bild/BZ” reported on the corresponding report. Anyone who does not want to publish such data should therefore not collect it in the first place.

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In the future, the coalition would like to assign additional teachers according to a filigree social index and no longer primarily orientate themselves on the language of origin. As justification, the green education expert Marianne Burkert-Eulitz points out that children who speak another language at home do not automatically speak bad German. However, all relevant surveys, including the school enrollment examinations, show that there is an extremely high degree of correspondence between the characteristic “non-German language of origin” and “weak knowledge of German”.

The same applies to the financial situation: In Berlin, a different language of origin is disproportionately often associated with the receipt of social transfers. The question of the proportion of children without German as their native language is also the most frequently requested information when parents are looking for a school. That became clear ten years ago, after countries like Berlin and Saxony had started putting this data online.