Concepts of ‘social justice and intercultural education’ as well as the understanding of their complex connections mark a contested field (Krüger-Potratz 2018, 2005; Bhatti/Leeman 2011; Diehm/Radtke 1999). In the late 20th and early 21st century, interpretation conflicts surrounding migration, the pluralisation of society and appropriate policy and pedagogical responses to it, have been more and more characterised by references to “scientifically based” findings (Bartels et al. 2023). Thus, the interrelationship between social and educational research, politics and institutional practice has also become the subject of critical research and self-understanding debates. In Germany, intensive research has been conducted on the “discovery” of the supposed problems in schools and vocational training faced by the descendants of “guest workers”, who had been settling in the Federal Republic of Germany since the post-war decades, by the social sciences (Czock 1993; Griese 1984). However, little research has been done yet on the more recent restructuring of the nexus between scientific research, education policy and practice in the course of implementing data-based school development in terms of social justice, plurality and democratic participation.  

The submitted paper examines the implications and consequences of the ongoing establishment of data-driven education policy and education management in the field of migration and schools. The starting point is the observation that the so called New Educational Governance as a transnational school reform concept – 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 Germany as in many other countries, particularly in the Anglo-American world. The introduction briefly outlines how in Germany, a phase of deregulation in the 1990s was followed by the implementation of a new national overall strategy for the development and assurance of the quality of teaching and schools, employing performance studies, national educational standards, competence-oriented instruction, indicator-based education reporting and the quest for evidence-based education (KMK 2016). Especially in the initial phase, the improvement of the educational success of children and young people with a migration history and/or from socioeconomically deprived family background has been declared a priority and education as a main field of “integration work” (KMK 2006: 2).

By means of a document analysis and a series of expert interviews with stakeholders in school administration and civil society organisations, it is investigated how and with which consequences educational requirements of the (post-)migration society are incorporated into new output-oriented and data-based school governance – and thereby (re-)conceptualized, distorted or excluded.

The theoretical frame draws on political-sociological policy research (e.g. Grek/Maroy/Verger 2021; Parreira do Amaral/Steiner-Khamsi/Thompson 2019). In contrast to a pragmatic-functionalist perspective, new educational governance is conceived as a technical and social apparatus that always has an impact beyond its technical purposes by conveying normative orientations and values and contributing to the institutionalisation of social power and difference orders (Grek/Maroy/Verger 2021, 7f.). To conceptualise the (re)constitution of school knowledge orders in terms of inclusion, justice and democracy, approaches from discourse and governmentality research are used (Forster 2015; Krasmann 2007).

The findings indicate that current initiatives to reduce educational inequality are counteracted by complex mechanisms of depoliticizing the discourse. Pupils and parents with migration history are positioned in a new way as deficit carriers vis-à-vis the school by recourse to ethnicizing and culturalizing attributions, while transformational educational and school development processes tend to be blocked. Here, the dissolution of boundaries between research and politics as a dimension of the New Governance as well as the positivism of school effectiveness research form a central hinge.

In order to highlight continuities and changes, the entire study combines a rough diachronic analysis of the school reform discourse from 1949 to 2025 with a detailed synchronic analysis of the discourse phase from 2000 to 2025. The corpus of material for the discourse analysis (Keller 2008) consists of documents published by state bodies at the federal level, primarily by the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs of the Länder (KMK). These allow for the development of consensual political knowledge that goes beyond the cultural sovereignty of the ‘Länder’ with their respective legal and political peculiarities. Since 2000, the field of education – especially schools – has emerged as a central area of action for integration policy, and key texts on integration policy are therefore also included. In addition, a series of semi-structured guided interviews (Bogner/Littich/Menz 2005) were conducted with stakeholders in school administration and civil society organisations in various federal states. In the qualitative data analysis content analysis methods were primarily used (Kuckartz/Rädiker 2024).

The findings show that, with the implementation of the data based school development a wide range of measures have been institutionalised to improve the educational success of students with a migration background and/or from disadvantaged families. However, the new regulations seem far from creating school conditions based on a human rights understanding of inclusion, in which a potentially unfinished diversity of human convictions, orientations, life paths and ways of life is unleashed and teachers and learners are encouraged and empowered to stand up against discrimination and break down structural barriers. Political spaces, as understood by Hannah Arendt (2017), in which plurality can emerge and become an opportunity for learning and educational processes for both pupils and professionals, seem to be systematically narrowed or closed off. Falling behind the awareness achieved in the 1990s that schools are social places where differences and exclusions are (co-)constructed in pedagogical interactions, claims to inclusion and justice are now largely identified with meritocracy and limited to more technical concerns of distributing scarce resources according to the indicated needs of subjects and school organisations, especially for the promotion of German language skills. At the same time, parents are increasingly being held responsible for taking personal responsibility for the educational success of their children (and that of the school). In a homogenising target group logic, pupils and parents with a migration background are positioned in a partly new way as deficit carriers vis-à-vis the school, while structural barriers and exclusions by the school institution itself – including the new management rationality – are hardly noticed. In this dominant orientation, a critical and transformative understanding of social justice and intercultural education in terms of addressing and dismantling forms of institutional discrimination in education policy and at the organisational level remains marginal.

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