Discrimination in Schools

Even though social class is at least as predictive of educational achievement as ethnicity in virtually all developed countries, experimental research on discrimination in education has overwhelmingly focused on the latter. This study investigates both ethnic discrimination and social class discrimination by elementary school teachers in Germany. Randomly sampled elementary school teachers who teach immigrants to evaluate an essay written by a fourth-grader have been asked. Results show no evidence for discrimination in grading. However, findings for teachers’ expectations of children’s future performance suggest a discriminatory bias along the lines of both ethnicity and social class. …