Primary School Choice and Ethnic School Segregation in German Elementary Schools

This study focuses on school choice processes and how they contribute to ethnic school segregation. The starting point is a heuristic framework on school selection decisions with a sequence of three stages: the perception of school alternatives, the evaluation of these alternatives, and eventually school access. In a step-by-step investigation of these stages, different mechanisms that may account for ethnic differences in school choice are discussed. The empirical assessment is based on a school choice survey on primary school selections in families of Turkish and German origin in the German city of Essen. The results reveal that, from the district schools available, Turkish children are more likely than German children to enter a school with a relatively larger proportion of foreign nationals, a pattern that in the aggregate seems to contribute to an increasing ethnic separation at the school level. Rather than originating from ethnic differences in evaluation or school access, the parent perception is of primary importance. Because of their unfamiliarity with Essen's elementary system, Turkish families frequently pay attention to only a single school. The option they consider is typically the one that accommodates more foreign nationals than the alternative district school.