The so called New Educational Governance – based on the two pillars of deregulation and privatization of (formerly) welfare state responsibility for education and, at the same time, stronger central control via quantitative (output) indicators – has profoundly changed educational policies and systems in normative and structural-organisational terms in many countries. In Germany, a phase of deregulation in the 1990s was followed by the development and implementation of a new national overall strategy for the development and assurance of the quality of teaching and schools (KMK 2002), employing performance studies, national educational standards, competence-oriented instruction, indicator-based education reporting and the quest for evidence-based education (KMK 2015). The starting-point for the proposed paper is that within this new regulatory framework also the issue of educational inequality, which had been lost out of sight in the 1980s, was brought back on the agenda. In ongoing reforms, the improvement of the educational success of children and young people with a migration history and/or a socioeconomically deprived family background has been declared a priority and education became a main field of “integration work” (KMK 2006: 2). Yet tensions between the school effectiveness and egalitarian educational goals became evident in many areas of school work and in the growing institutional segregation of pupils with a (flight-)migration background (SVR 2018).

The proposed paper seeks to understand more precisely the connections between the New educational governance and the reproduction of social inequalities or the possibilities of inclusive school development in the post-migration societal context. In ideal-typical abstraction, I also refer to the heterogeneous concepts, instructions and practices of New Governance as the school effectiveness approach. The school effectiveness approach operates on different levels of the discourse simultaneously: as a scientific research paradigm in the narrower sense, as a political strategy and as a set of specific instruments and practices for dealing with school-pedagogical problems.

Including empirical results of an as yet unfinished discourse analysis, the following questions will be elicited: How are aspects of inclusion, social justice and democratic participation incorporated into the New Governance at the intersection of political school reform and migration/integration discourse in Germany between the years 2000 and 2020 and thereby (re)conceptualised, distorted or excluded? How do national, culturalising or racialising differentiations (also in intersectional entanglement with other lines of inequality) inscribe themselves in politics, institutions and society in new ways through the restructuring of educational governance - including the changed relationship between educational research, politics and school practice? And what consequences result from this for the professional actions of teachers and schools as well as for the educational access and experiences of pupils and parents? In order to be able to grasp and classify the essential aspects and interrelations of this complex of problems, I will first explore relevant theoretical points of reference: the conception of epistemological politics (Ricken 2011), theories of governance and governmentality (Amos 2016). These complementary perspectives focus on how "statehood as a field of political intervention and thus the field of the political itself" (Krasmann 2007: 285) are produced as an effect of government technologies and social practices. In connection with concepts of plurality, justice and discrimination, they open up a heuristic framework for examining the extent to which discursive inclusions and exclusions and potential gateways for discrimination or new possibilities for inclusive schooling are opened up or institutionalised within the framework of the new governance in connection with the functionalisation and functionality of scientific knowledge.

How goals of inclusion, social justice and democratic participation are reconfigured in the discourse on schooling and migration in the FRG during the transition to output- and data-based education management can be concretised on the basis of a knowledge sociological discourse analysis (Keller 2008). In order to make continuities as well as changes visible, the discourse analysis combines a rough diachronic analysis of the school reform discourse from 1949 to 2020 with a detailed synchronic analysis for the discourse phase from 2000 to 2020. As material serve documents of central federal political bodies, above all the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs of the Federal States (KMK), published from 1945 to 2019 in the thematic context of education and migration. These allow for the development of consensual political knowledge that goes beyond the cultural sovereignty of the Länder with their respective legal and political characteristics. Since the education sector – especially schools – has emerged as a central field of action in integration policy since 2000, key integration policy texts are also included. In order to be able to work out the implicit normations, ambiguities, ambivalences, contradictions and omissions of the discourse, in a differentiated way, the study resorts to analytical strategies of grounded theory (Strauss/Corbin 1994) and argumentation analysis (Kopperschmidt 1989).

The discourse analysis shows that the implementation of the New School Governance institutionalised a variety of measures to improve the school success of children and young people with a migration history and/or in deprived living conditions. However, the new regulations seem to be far removed from the design of school processes in the human rights understanding of inclusion. In the primarily instrumental logic of quality improvement, justice claims are identified primarily with meritocratic performance justice; in this understanding, they are limited to rather technical concerns of the allocation of resources according to the indicated neediness of subjects and school organisations, especially for the promotion of German language skills. Activation measures motivated by integration and education policy increasingly seek to guide parents to take responsibility for the educational success of their children (and that of the school). Pupils and parents with a migration history are primarily positioned as deficit carriers. In contrast, the possibilities of opening up 'political' spaces in the understanding of Hannah Arendt (2017), in which plurality appears and students and professionals can deal with the complexities of difference, discrimination and equality and act together, seem to be systematically narrowed or closed off. The interplay of the epistemology and methodology of school effectiveness research with the managerialist and knowledge-political orientation of the New Governance forms a central hinge here. This not only corroborates the thesis of the depoliticisation and de-democratisation of school processes in the context of New Governance (Bellmann 2015; Forster 2015; Biesta 2010). Instead of dissolving institutional barriers, the school effectiveness approach in Germany contributes to the perpetuation of culturalising and racialising boundaries and exclusions at the very time when the decades-long "anti-pluralist narrowing of the integration discourse" (Bielefeldt 2007: 18) has potentially been broken by legal reforms.

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