The educational disadvantage of pupils with a migrant background is documented by international comparative studies of school performance in Germany and other European migration societies (cf. Autorengruppe Bildungsberichterstattung 2016: 161ff).

In the German-speaking countries there are studies that examine the role of teachers for the educational success of migrant pupils. A key finding is that the performance of migrant pupils is relatively underestimated by the teachers and that they rarely receive a recommendation for higher secondary education (Gershenson et al. 2015; Lüdemann & Schwerdt 2010). In addition, overview articles on the current state of research on teachers in Germany show that the migration-related diversity and multilingualism of pupils is more often perceived as a deficit than as a resource (cf. Auernheimer & Rosen 2017). However, what these studies have in common is that they do not consider the migration background of the investigated teachers.

In German-speaking research on the subject of pre-service and in-service teachers with a migration background, qualitative studies predominate (Mantel 2016, Akbaba 2017, Panagiotopoulou & Rosen 2016) compared to studies with a mixed-methods design (Bandorski & Karakaşoğlu 2013, Georgi et al. 2011). Some of these studies have already been presented within the framework of NW 7 at the ECER 2013 and 2014 (these contributions are collected in Lengyel & Rosen 2015).

With regard to quantitative studies, there is enormous desideratum. In particular, there is currently no dataset available that enables an evidence-based comparison of migrant and non-migrant teachers with regard to their family backgrounds, educational and professional experience, attitudes/beliefs and towards the competencies of their pupils. In our contribution, we do not yet examine if students benefit from being taught by a migrant teacher but provide some descriptive background information on migrant teachers: We first examine their motivations to become a teacher and their attitudes to interculturality as previous literature implicitly assumes migrant teachers to be different from non-migrant teachers in this respect (Edelmann 2013, Karakaşoğlu 2011). In our empirical analyses we use data from the German Educational Panel Study (NEPS) that is one of the few large scale studies that provides a sufficiently large number of migrant teachers. We use data from teachers in lower secondary schools to answer the following question: Do migrant teachers differ from non-migrant teachers in terms of characteristics that are potentially relevant to student learning?

In our empirical analysis we use data from the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) (Blossfeld et al 2011). The NEPS is one of the few large-scale education data sets in Germany with a multi-actor design, i.e. providing information of both, students and teachers (as well as parents, headmasters and others). The school samples were anchored in students, with additional information gathered from on their teachers. In our analyses of teachers’ characteristics, we use the surveys of students in grade 5 and 9 (so-called starting cohort SC3 and SC4) resp. the data of their teachers. The first wave of these two studies was conducted in 2010. We include all teachers observed in 2010, adding (additional) teachers surveyed in the subsequent waves in 2011 and 2012. We analyse the data cross-sectionally ensuring that each teacher was included only once in the pooled dataset. Our sample of teachers consists of 3635 cases. Unfortunately, the number of migrant teachers was not sufficiently large to conduct further analyses on student’s educational outcomes (but see Klein, Neugebauer and Jacob 2017). To define migrant status of teachers we use the variables on respondent's place of birth and parent's place of birth. Teachers were directly asked for their migration status: ‘yes, I was born abroad’, ‘yes, I was born in Germany, but at least one parent is born abroad’, and ‘no’. We use option 1 and 2 to define migrant teachers. By this definition, 5% of all teachers are categorized as migrant teachers. We first compare migrant teachers to non-migrant teachers looking at socio-demographic variables (gender and age) and several job-related attributes and opinions. In the next step, we compare attitudes towards migration-related topics between migrant and non-migrant teachers. Unfortunately, these items were only asked in the last wave of the survey, so we end up with only 36 migrant teachers in this analysis.

Due to the data structure, we can only report descriptive findings that are of limited explanatory. Teachers with and without migration background hardly differ • in terms of their socio-demographic characteristics: There is no significant difference in the gender distribution of both groups; regarding age, migrant teachers are considerable younger than non-migrant teachers • in their motives for becoming a teacher, except that a teacher’s prestige has been more important for migrant teachers than for non-migrant teachers. Teachers with and without migration background do not differ much in their attitudes regarding migrant students and their families. There are some differences in the responses between non-migrant and migrant teachers, however, only the statements on migrant student's families („Many conflicts with students with a migration background emerge because their families stick with the traditions of their countries of origin“) and student's difficulties in school („Students with a migration background often face problems in school because they do not want to adapt to German culture”) are (weakly) significant. In both cases, migrant teachers do less agree to the statements that the lower educational success of pupils with a migration background can be attributed unilaterally to the allegedly traditional families or the pupils' lack of willingness to integrate. Given the low number of cases, the results can only serve as a hint that the results from qualitative research concerning intercultural competencies of migrant and non-migrant teachers might be of some explanatory power. Further research is needed to investigate differences or rather similarities between migrant and non-migrant teachers in detail.

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