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SCHOOLS

Mass school year failure raises questions

A German state government has launched an investigation into why an entire year group failed their school leavers exams at a private school. Their teachers' qualifications are now to be checked.

Published: 2 July 2013 12:36 CEST
Mass school year failure raises questions
Photo: DPA

In Bavaria, 97 percent of state-schooled teens and 90 percent of privately educated teens pass their Abitur leavers exam. But in a shock result, not one of the 27 seniors at the EPFOS private vocational high school in Schweinfurt succeeded in making the grade.

Despite priding itself on being the first private school to specialize in economics, not one student passed their economics exam. All of them received a grade ‘six’ fail mark in the subject, as well as in maths and engineering. The pupils fared slightly better in other subjects but still not well enough for an overall pass.

The state government’s ministry for education said on Monday that it had begun an investigation into the “quality of qualifications” achieved by the staff, Die Welt newspaper reported. Blame is being pointed not at the students, but the teachers.

Reason behind the disaster “has to lie in the structural make-up” of EPFOS, ministry spokesman Ludwig Unger told the newspaper. The school has only been open two years and this was the first group of students to take the national leavers exam.

Officials said they would be going to the school on Tuesday to talk with teachers, pupils and students. It is possible the investigation could end with the EPFOS’s teaching licence being revoked, lawyer Patricia Fuchs-Politzki told Die Welt.

Fuchs-Politzki has been approached by the parents of 20 of the affected students, all of whom have been told by the school they can repeat the year free of charge. Despite the school offering to waive the normal annual fee of around €1,700, none of the students seemed keen to accept the offer, one mother told the paper.

School owner Michael Schwarz has offered no official statement about the debacle, but was quoted as conceding he had been “a little naïve in some areas” of running a school.

For Fuchs-Politzki it is imperative that the pupils are enrolled in a state school after the summer holidays. It could well be, she said, that they have to retake not only the final year, but the one before. “This will then be two lost years.”

Some students in lower years at the EPFOS are reportedly considering leaving the school to go elsewhere.

The Local/jcw

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DISCRIMINATION

Schools in Sweden discriminate against parents with Arabic names: study

Parents with Arabic-sounding names get a less friendly response and less help when choosing schools in Sweden, according to a new study from the University of Uppsala.

Published: 6 April 2022 12:05 CEST
Schools in Sweden discriminate against parents with Arabic names: study

In one of the largest discrimination experiments ever carried out in the country, 3,430 primary schools were contacted via email by a false parent who wanted to know more about the school. The parent left information about their name and profession.

In the email, the false parent stated that they were interested in placing their child at the school, and questions were asked about the school’s profile, queue length, and how the application process worked. The parent was either low-educated (nursing assistant) or highly educated (dentist). Some parents gave Swedish names and others gave “Arabic-sounding” names.

The report’s author, Jonas Larsson Taghizadeh said that the study had demonstrated “relatively large and statistically significant negative effects” for the fictional Arabic parents. 

“Our results show that responses to emails signed with Arabic names from school principals are less friendly, are less likely to indicate that there are open slots, and are less likely to contain positive information about the school,” he told The Local. 

READ ALSO: Men with foreign names face job discrimination in Sweden: study

The email responses received by the fictional Arabic parents were rated five percent less friendly than those received by the fictional Swedish parents, schools were 3.2 percentage points less likely to tell Arabic parents that there were open slots at the school, and were 3.9 percentage points less likely to include positive information about the municipality or the school. 

There was no statistically significant difference in the response rate and number of questions answered by schools to Swedish or Arabic-sounding parents. 

Taghizadeh said that there was more discrimination against those with a low social-economic status job than against those with an Arabic name, with the worst affected group being those who combined the two. 

“For socioeconomic discrimination, the results are similar, however, here the discrimination effects are somewhat larger,” he told The Local. 

Having a high economic status profession tended to cancel out the negative effects of having an Arabic name. 

“The discrimination effects are substantially important, as they could potentially indirectly influence parents’ school choice decision,” Taghizadeh said.

“Investigating socioeconomic discrimination is also important in itself, as discrimination is seldom studied and as explicit discrimination legislation that bans class-based discrimination is rare in Western countries including Sweden, in contrast to laws against ethnic discrimination.” 

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