ABSTRACT
As we have seen in the chapter of Giustozzi, Blokland and Freitag, the scarcity of urban resources and the wish of urban residents to secure resources for the reproduction of enhancement of their social position make housing and education a field of struggle that draws and reinforces boundaries between social groups. In many parts of the city, residential and school segregation coincide: the local school reflects the social and ethnic composition of the neighbourhood. In other areas, however, in particular those where gentrification is changing the social composition of the neighbourhoods, school segregation and residential segregation appear less of a one-to-one match. In principle, given a catchment area system, schools should be as segregated as neighbourhoods. However, German studies on school segregation demonstrate that especially in socially and ethnically heterogeneous neighbourhoods, the fixed catchment areas do not reflect the residential composition (Schulz 2001, 14-15; Noreisch 2007). These studies show that especially middle class residents seem to have issues with sending their children to schools with many poor or migrant children, so that German scholars have even spoken of an ‘exodus’ through sending children to other public or even private schools (Häußermann 2008, 343-4; Häußermann 2009, 96; Bauer and Häußermann 2009, 360; Kersten 2007, 51; Radtke 2004, 209 ff.; Häußermann et al. 2008, 40). These scholars argue that the elementary schools with many migrant children get to systemic dead ends in teaching, as too many children have language problems, have not been to a Kindergarten before entering school – which is voluntary in Germany – even though especially migrant children whose parents do not speak German at home profit from Kindergarten strongly (Kersten 2007, 51; Geißler and Weber-Menges 2008, 21). In connection to the chapters by Lewek and Schilling, we see here that general racist views about the deficiencies of immigrants reside in the moral orientations of mainstream society. Such forms of racism may not be located within the thoughts of individuals, who may believe that personally, they are not racist and racism is a matter of the (East Berlin or East German) narrow-minded uneducated ‘other’. But their practices draw on racist
assumptions about immigrants, and narratives about otherness are constructed in their reflections on their individual practices.
