Majority of Germans Fear Greater Educational Inequality Due to Digitalization
Digitalization could lead to greater inequality in Germany’s education system – this is a worry of 53% of respondents to the ifo Institute’s latest Education Survey. Only 14% do not think this is an issue. A good 62% consider unequal opportunities between children with and without a migration background to be a major problem. Almost as many respondents are of the same opinion regarding unequal opportunities between children from stable and difficult social backgrounds. “Concerns about children from different social backgrounds not having the same opportunities in the education system have grown in recent years,” says Ludger Wößmann, Director of the ifo Center for the Economics of Education. “Germans want something to be done about it.”
When asked how to combat educational inequality, 69% of respondents are in favor of targeted financial support for schools with a large number of disadvantaged children, in the form of an “opportunity budget.” Only 20% of respondents are against this. Just as large a majority of 69% thinks the proportion of pupils with foreign citizenship and insufficient language skills should be limited to 30% per class, while 20% are against. About 65% of Germans support the introduction of an index that shows whether schools are facing particular problems due to the social environment of the student body, while 18% oppose it. And 55% support salary bonuses for teachers at schools with many pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds; 31% are against.
The results are based on an evaluation of selected questions from the ifo Education Survey 2023. The survey was conducted among a total of 5,636 people from May 17 to June 5, 2023, by Talk Online Panel GmbH.
Was denken die Deutschen zu Chancenungleichheit im Bildungssystem?
ifo Institut, München, 2023
ifo Schnelldienst, 2023, 76, Nr. 11, 33-39
ifo Education Survey 2023: What Germans Think about the Quality of Schools
How do the Germans grade the schools in their federal state? Where do they see serious problems in the school system? And what solutions do they prefer - for example, for teacher shortage? The ifo Education Survey 2023 examines these and other questions.
