Keywords

1 Objectives and Research Questions of BiKS Project 7

The proportion of students with a migrant background in the German school system has increased significantly over the last three decades. These children often show higher school dropout rates, attain lower school grades, have the highest proportion of graduates without vocational qualifications, attend upper secondary schools less frequently, and are less likely to graduate from university than children from native families (e.g., Bildungsberichterstattung 2012, p. 70). However, there are also significant differences in educational attainment between migrants from different origin countries (Segeritz et al. 2010).

In Germany, the Turkish population is not only the largest migrant group, but also the group with the most pronounced disadvantages in the German school system (Kristen and Granato 2004). The aim of the BiKS Project 7 was to investigate the mechanisms of disparities in educational success (grades, competences, and transition probabilities) by migration background, particularly of students from Turkey, before and after the transition from primary to secondary school in Germany. This transition, which occurs between the ages of 10 and 12, is perhaps the most crucial branching point in the German education system.

In the BiKS Project 7, educational disparities between different immigrant and native-born groups were empirically explored by using Boudon’s (1974) theoretical concepts of primary and secondary effects of social origin. The primary effect is the influence of the family of origin on a child’s school performance (Breen and Goldthorpe 1997). It results from the interaction of a child’s genetic makeup with class-specific primary socialization processes, cultural experiences in the family environment, parents’ (German) language skills, and parents’ potential to support their children in school. As all children in school are confronted with middle-class academic standards and German is the language of school instruction, children from lower social classes, parents with lower educational attainment, and specific migrant backgrounds (e.g., parents from Turkey) on average tend to perform worse at school than children from upper-class families, better educated parents, and native families.

Beyond these socially linked levels of school achievement, there is also the so-called secondary effect of social origin (Boudon 1974). This effect relates to the decision-making behavior of families who, due to their specific class situation, evaluate the costs and benefits of higher educational attainment differently (Breen and Goldthorpe 1997). For example, parents from different social classes tend to choose different educational pathways for their children even when their school performance is similar at the end of primary school (see the results of the BiKS Project 5 in Blossfeld et al. this volume). Several mechanisms are thought to influence the secondary effect. First, parents from higher social classes (which are normally better educated) typically have more ambitious educational aspirations for their children (cf. Gambetta 1996 and Blossfeld et al. this volume). Second, educationally disadvantaged parents from lower social classes, who do not have their own experience with upper secondary school, not only expect comparatively higher costs for more ambitious educational goals for their children, but they also rate their children’s probability of success in upper secondary school as lower. And third, there is the status maintenance motive of families (see the results of the BiKS Project 5 in Blossfeld et al. this volume), i.e., status losses loom greater than status gains for all families (Kahneman and Tversky 1979). Thus, parents with higher status have a stronger desire in maintaining their social status over generations and to send their children to upper secondary schools than parents for whom this school type represents an advancement. In other words: It is not the expected absolute educational level of a child that counts for parental decisions, but the expected educational level of the child relative to that of the family—that is supposed to reproduce the social status of the family intergenerationally.

The literature shows that the mechanisms of primary and secondary effects on educational participation seem to be different for migrant and native German students. On the one hand, the primary effect of social origin is supposed to be much stronger for migrant children due to often insufficient German language skills, lack of context-specific German cultural capital, and a familial cultural capital which at least partly has lost its value due to migration. On the other hand, low social class position seems to be less important for migrants’ secondary effects. Thus, the secondary effects are found to be significantly smaller for migrant children (Kristen and Granato 2004). In other words, when children’s school performance is controlled for, migrant children have an even higher transition rate to upper secondary school. A first reason for this observation seems to be that immigrant parents hold extraordinarily high educational aspirations for their children in all industrial countries (Heath and Birnbaum 2007). When migration is voluntary and economically motivated, it appears to be closely linked to the hope of a better life in the destination country. However, since the first generation of migrants often finds itself in rather unskilled and low-paid manual and service jobs in the destination countries, they project their high aspirations for advancement into their children (‘immigrant optimism hypothesis’; see Kao and Tienda 1995). A second, (complementary) explanation is immigrants’ lack of familiarity with the German school system. For example, parents from lower social classes with an immigrant background might therefore easily overestimate their children’s chances of making a successful transition to upper secondary school due to insufficient information about the academic performance requirements of different school types in Germany. Thus, the BiKS project 7 expected children with a migration background to have not only stronger primary effects but also smaller secondary effects compared to children of German origin.

Another important extension of Boudon’s distinction between primary and secondary effects was introduced by Esser (2011, p. 10). He refers to teacher recommendations in the transition from primary to secondary school as the tertiary effect of social origin. It is well known that children from families with higher socioeconomic status are more likely to receive a recommendation for upper secondary school (‘Gymnasium’) from their teachers, even if their grades are basically the same (Ditton 2007; Ditton et al. 2005). The literature offers four explanations for this effect that are discussed below. BiKS Project 7 therefore investigated also whether and to what extent teacher recommendations influence the educational opportunities of native and students from different immigrant backgrounds in the transition to secondary school.

In addition, the BiKS Project 7 examined how different institutional arrangements and structures of the school systems in the federal states of Bavaria and Hesse affect the educational opportunities of children with migration background. In Bavaria, the transition from primary to secondary school is tied to a relatively strict teacher recommendation that is difficult for parents to circumvent (see Blossfeld et al. this volume). In contrast, parents in Hesse are less bound by teacher recommendations and are therefore freer to choose the future type of school for their children. Thus, the question arises how these regulations of teachers’ recommendations influence the educational opportunities of migrant children.

Finally, the BiKS Project 7 was able to examine how the educational aspirations of parents (with and without a migration background) have changed in Bavaria and Hesse based on their concrete transition experiences to secondary schools and their children’s school biographies in secondary schools.

In summary, BiKS Project 7 addressed the following eight specific research questions:

  1. 1.

    How is the change in academic achievement of immigrant students in primary school affected by family’s cultural capital?

  2. 2.

    How important is the proportion of children with a migration background in a school class for the acquisition of vocabulary and mathematical competencies by children with and without a migration background?

  3. 3.

    Are there differences in primary and secondary effects of social origin between native and immigrant children? Do immigrant children indeed have stronger primary and weaker secondary effects, and why?

  4. 4.

    Do lower educational opportunities in the parents’ country of origin lead to higher educational aspirations of immigrant parents for their children in Germany?

  5. 5.

    What is the role of migrant’s lack of familiarity with the German school system and migrants’ parental German language skills?

  6. 6.

    How do teacher recommendations at the end of primary school affect children with low social status and migration background (tertiary effect of social background)?

  7. 7.

    What happens to the educational opportunities of migrant children when parents in different federal states are more (e.g., Bavaria) or less (e.g., Hesse) bound by teacher recommendations at the end of primary school?

  8. 8.

    How do the educational aspirations of parents with a migration background change after the children have made a concrete transition to a specific secondary school and families have gained their own experiences with secondary schools (stabilization vs. revision of previous educational decisions)?

The BiKS research group used the concept of place of birth of the parents to define participants as having or not having a migration background, although various other measures (nationality, year of immigration, everyday language spoken at home, subjective integration into German society, cultural identity) were also available in the data. According to this definition 1,700 of the 2,215 participating children in the first BiKS panel wave were defined as native Germans and just under a quarter of the stratified sample were classified as children with a migration background. This includes 205 children for whom one parent was born abroad and 311 children for whom both parents immigrated to Germany. The largest migrant group in the sample came from Turkey, with more than one hundred cases followed by migrants from eastern Europe (78 cases), southern Europe (59 cases) and the former Soviet Union (57 cases). Several attempts were made to get access to and enhance participation of migrant parents and children, e.g. disproportional stratified sampling of institutions with high, medium and low migrant share,Footnote 1 bilingual initial invitation letters and information booklets (German and Turkish) as well as bilingual questionnaires (cf. Kurz et al. 2007). Nevertheless, the case numbers were too small to run differential quantitative analysis on each of the various migrant groups. Due to missing data and panel attrition, the number of cases in the analyses varies also across waves and statistical analyses. Panel stability was somewhat higher for natives than for migrants. Heckman’s (1979) sample selection corrections were therefore used in the estimated models to deal with these selection biases.

2 Primary and Secondary Effects of Social Origin and Migration Background

The longitudinal data from the BiKS-8-18 cohort (see Homuth, Schmitt et al. this volume) includes information about the most important actors in the educational process using detailed instruments. Children from Hesse and Bavaria were tested and surveyed in their class context, interviews were conducted with their parents, and teachers were asked to evaluate the respective school classes and single children participating in the study. This unique data source made it possible to investigate in detail the impact of primary, secondary, and tertiary effects of social origins and immigrant backgrounds as well as the influences of teachers and institutional settings in Bavaria and Hesse before and after the transition to secondary school (see also Artelt el al. (2013) for more details on the instruments and data). The quantitative analyses were also complemented by an in-depth qualitative study based on interviews with parents from Turkey.

How is the change in academic achievement of immigrant students in primary school affected by family’s cultural capital?

We begin with a short description of the empirical results of the BiKS Project 7 regarding the explanation of primary effects of social origin at primary school age. According to social reproduction theory, parents’ cultural capital is central to children’s educational success in school (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977). However, familial cultural capital is often context-specific, so that children with migration background may lose at least some of its value if families migrate from the origin to the destination country (Chiswick and DebBurman 2004). A lack of school-relevant skills within the family can hardly be compensated by the school institutions or the children’s own initiatives. Thus, on average, children of migrants should have lower academic success in school than children from native families. Another, more optimistic theory is the cultural mobility model, which assumes that children with a migrant background can promote their educational success by making targeted investments in relevant cultural activities of the destination country—and thereby compensate for the lack of cultural family capital on educational success (Aschaffenburg and Maas 1997; DiMaggio 1982). To empirically test these two competing hypotheses, BiKS Project 7 used the measures on reading literacy (for details see Artelt et al. 2013, as well as Homuth, Schmitt and Pfost this volume and Pfost et al. this volume) as well as several indicators of cultural capital in the family: (1) parents’ highest level of schooling, (2) the number of books in the household, (3) the frequency of parents’ (usually the mothers’) reading of books, newspapers, and attendance at high cultural events, and (4) data on whether the child likes to read, visit libraries, and attends high cultural events. In addition, for the immigrant children, BiKS recorded how often German and other languages are spoken at home.

Instead of describing the cultural capital of families and children only at one point in time (i.e., based on a cross-sectional observation), the BiKS Project 7 examined the gains in reading literacy from the third to fourth grade using a so-called ‘value added model’ (Schneider and Pfost 2013). The results of these analyses were, however, not so clear-cut: On the one hand, they support the assumption of social reproduction theory that there is a strong influence of parental formal education and parents’ high-cultural activities on the development of children’s reading competency. On the other hand, these results are consistent with an extended version of the cultural mobility model, which predicts a strong influence of students’ reading behavior. Most of the indicators used on the different forms of cultural capital showed comparably high correlations with the reading literacy development among students from immigrant and nonimmigrant families. However, surprisingly, the language spoken at home had no particular significance for the growth of reading literacy from the third to the fourth grade. Although the BiKS Project 7 found that the achievement gap increases by social background and that cultural capital and cultural activities in the family are responsible for this change, the gap between children with and without an immigrant background did not widen over time.

How important is the proportion of children with a migration background in a school class for the acquisition of vocabulary and mathematical competencies by children with and without a migration background?

The BiKS Project 7 also investigated whether the proportion of children with an immigrant background in the school class has an influence on children’s achievement development (primary effects). Here, following Duncan and Raudenbush (2001, p. 366), the vocabulary and mathematical competencies of students in primary school were analyzed (for a detailed description of the method, models and results see Schneider 2013). The following two hypotheses regarding the effect of the proportion of children with an immigrant background in the classroom were examined:

  1. (1)

    A higher proportion of children with an immigrant background in the classroom, especially if these students have difficulties with the German language, leads teachers to lower their instructional level and thus reduces the learning progress of all students in the classroom, regardless of their immigrant background.

  2. (2)

    A higher proportion of children with a migration background in the school class is associated with lower incentives for these children to learn German, as they may also talk in the (non-German) family language during breaks as well as before and after school (if children from the same language group attend the class). Thus, particularly children with an immigrant background should have a lower learning progress in German language skills.

The multilevel models of the BiKS Project 7 (Schneider 2013) show that vocabulary development increased independently of the proportion of children with an immigrant background in the classroom. However, a higher proportion of children with an immigrant background in the school class decreased the growth in mathematical competencies. Interaction effects between a student’s migration background and the share of children with a migration background in the school class were not statistically significant. Hence, the results of the BiKS Project 7 only partly support the hypothesis that teachers adjust the pace of instruction to the immigrant composition of the children in the classroom. While it seems that mathematical competencies indeed change primarily as a function of classroom experiences, this cannot be found for vocabulary acquisition. One possible explanation could be that the latter might occur more in the family context than through structures provided by the classroom or classmates.

Are there differences in primary and secondary effects of social origin between native and immigrant children?

The descriptive results of the BiKS Project 7 demonstrate that the results differ according to whether parental social classFootnote 2 or parental educational attainmentFootnote 3 is chosen as the indicator of social origin for native and immigrant students. While immigrant students from the salariat and intermediate classes perform similarly in school to their respective native groups, it is mainly working-class immigrants who perform significantly worse than their native counterparts. Thus, when social class is included in the statistical analysis, the problem of low-performing migrants is heavily concentrated in the lower social classes and does not affect migrant children from higher social classes to the same extent. However, when we look at parental educational level as the social origin measure, we see that immigrant students perform worse than natives at all levels of parental education.

BiKS Project 7 also estimated logistic regression models separately for each social class, controlling for school performance. The results show that children with an immigrant background tend to go to the Gymnasium also with lower school grades than natives. Native working-class parents move to the Gymnasium only when their grades are very good, while native white-collar parents send their children to the Gymnasium even when their grades are significantly lower. Thus, while the transition rates to upper secondary school of native children differ considerably by social class (strong secondary effect of social origin), migrant children choose the Gymnasium with roughly the same average grades across all three social classes (working class, middle class and white collar). In other words, they show a weak secondary effect of social origin.

Using counterfactual analysis (see Erikson et al. 2005), the BiKS Project 7 also examined the relative importance of primary and secondary origin effects for families with and without an immigrant background (Relikowski et al. 2009, 2010, 2012). This advanced analytical approach is based on a decomposition of children’s class specific academic performance distributions and their respective transition probability functions to upper secondary school (Gymnasium). Counterfactual analysis allows to estimate two quantities (see Erikson et al. 2005): (1) what proportion of a given social group (e.g. working class families) would make the transition to the Gymnasium, if one would assume the school achievement distribution of a different social group (e.g., the salariat); and (2) what proportion of a given social group (e.g. working class families) would make the transition to the Gymnasium, if one would retain the school achievement distribution of this social group (e.g. working class families) and were to assume the transition probabilities to the Gymnasium of a different social group (e.g., the salariat). Using these estimated transition proportions to the Gymnasium, the average of the resulting two log odds ratios between two social classes can be used to estimate the respective primary and secondary effects for different social classes (Jackson et al. 2007).

The empirical results of this counterfactual analyses clearly show that primary effects played a major role for the transition decision—for both migrant and native children. In addition, the school performance of migrant children within each of the different social origin groups is always worse than that of native-born students. Thus, the results not only underline the outstanding importance of primary effects of social origin for the transition from primary to secondary schools, but also provide evidence for the decisive role of primary effects for immigrant children. In comparison, secondary effects of social origin were found to be less significant for migrant children than for children from native families. For any given social class and for comparable academic performances of children, students with a migrant background are more likely to go to the Gymnasium than native children. As expected, this is due to the higher educational aspirations of migrants. The higher educational aspirations of migrants compared to natives were then studied in BiKS Project 7 in more detail with both qualitative and quantitative methods.

Do immigrant children indeed have stronger primary and weaker secondary effects, and why? Results from a qualitative study

As early as the 1980s, empirical studies in Germany showed that among migrants, Turkish parents had significantly higher educational aspirations on average than native parents. The BiKS Project 7 therefore investigated in detail why migrant parents from Turkey showed much higher realistic educational aspirationsFootnote 4 than natives at the transition to secondary school, even though their children had also a weaker school performance on average (Relikowski 2012; Relikowski et al. 2012).

Two hypotheses explaining these higher educational aspirations among Turkish migrants were investigated, namely the immigrant optimism hypothesis and the information deficit hypothesis. The immigrant optimism hypothesis claims that immigrants are distinguished from the majority population by a particular strong desire for upward mobility, which is due to the fact that (voluntary) migration is only carried out when it is associated with a well-founded expectation of improved living conditions and socioeconomic opportunities (Kao and Tienda 1995). However, while the first generation of immigrants in the German labor market is often channeled into low occupational positions, parental expectations of advancement are then shifted to the next generation (e.g. Boos-Nünning 1989).

According to the information deficit hypothesis, incomplete information about institutional hurdles and academic performance requirements in the German educational system on the one hand and a misjudgment of their child’s school performance due to parents’ low familiarity with the German school system on the other hand leads to an overestimation of the probabilities of educational success and to the development of unrealistically high parental educational aspirations for their children. In a first step, these two hypotheses were qualitatively assessed and further developed using a subsample of parents with Turkish origin from the BiKS sample (Relikowski et al. 2012). 21 semi-standardized guided interviews were conducted with parent couples of Turkish origin at the end of primary school. The guidelines were designed taking into account relevant findings on parental educational aspirations (e.g., Kristen and Dollmann 2009) and results of the previous surveys. The qualitative methodology was based on the work of Hopf and Schmidt (1993). To this end, the interviews were coded with reference to the hypotheses. In subsequent steps, these hypotheses were supplemented or revised on the basis of the interviews, and case comparisons were used to identify central patterns of reasoning underlying educational aspirations. In order to be able to capture the specifics of the Turkish migration background that go beyond social status, interviews with parents of German origin (n = 40) were also comparatively analyzed. Based on the qualitative analyses, the following four central background aspects of parental educational aspirations could be identified (see again Relikowski et al. 2012 and also Yılmaz et al. 2011) which largely support the two hypotheses:

  1. (1)

    It could be shown that, in addition to social origin and ethnic characteristics, it was important whether the Turkish parents had their own personal experiences with the German education system. Parents who were not familiar with the German school system considered a broader range of secondary school types for their children than those parents who had themselves attended German schools. Like native parents, they tended to orient themselves to schools that are familiar to them.

  2. (2)

    Parents of Turkish origin who did not attend the German school system are more likely to assess upper secondary schools as achievable for their children than parents who attended schools in Germany. This perspective is closely related to their specific perception of their child’s school performance: Those parents who are less familiar with the German education system, focus more on their child’s potential performance than their actual school performance. That perspective contrasts with the native comparison group. Parents with Turkish origin, especially if they have a low educational background, are more likely to see the opportunities of the German school system for their child than its limitations.

  3. (3)

    It has been shown that Turkish parents, regardless of their background characteristics, are less intrinsically than instrumentally motivated with regard to their children’s education. Thus, they view education as a means to (professional) opportunities on the labor market. Parents of Turkish origin express a strong desire that their children should later have better jobs and higher pay than they do. In contrast, native parents in particular pay more attention to their child’s well-being during their school years.

  4. (4)

    In contrast to native parents, Turkish parents clearly view education from a collectivist perspective. Attending secondary schools is thus less a question of the fit between a child’s school performance and the type of secondary school, but rather an expression of the desire to counteract the perceived disadvantage as a migrant of Turkish origin in Germany as a whole.

In summary, it seems that parents of Turkish origin who have not internalized the ways of thinking and attitudes toward the educational system typical of their class situation interpret secondary school forms in Germany in the specific context of their migration background and thus make more “ambitious” transition decisions than native parents of the same social class.

The key findings of this qualitative study were tested in a quantitative analysis using the entire BiKS-8-18 cohort data set (see Relikowski 2012 for details). These analyses largely supported the findings of qualitative results. It was found that parents with a migration background who belonged to the working class and have a low level of education hold comparatively high realistic aspirations. This can be interpreted in terms of the immigrant optimism hypothesis because it is precisely the parents who were unable to realize their own hopes for social advancement through migration who projected their expectations to the next generation. Some of the immigrant parents indicated that they were unable to achieve their educational goals in their country of origin, and some others said that they were unable to get an adequate job in Germany for their educational qualification. Thus, instead of the expected social advancement through migration, a rather sobering reality of placement in unskilled jobs followed for many of these migrant parents. This experience, however, did not diminish their aspirations for their children’s upward mobility—quite the contrary is the case. Turkish parents showed that their aspirations for their children’s success in school were closely linked to their expectations of advantages in the labor market. Thus, their special appreciation of upper secondary school was strongly instrumentally motivated.

Do lower educational opportunities in the parents’ country of origin lead to higher educational aspirations of immigrant parents for their children in Germany?

The quantitative analysis was also able to further explore the importance of parents’ own educational careers for their educational aspirations (Relikowski 2012). The educational aspirations for their children were particularly high when parents had experienced structural barriersFootnote 5 to their own educational acquisition. Particularly migrants from countries with a low level of tertiary education, such as Turkey, had much higher expectations for their children’s educational careers in Germany than migrant parents from countries with better access to higher education. The fact that information deficits act as a reinforcing factor for this stronger upward motivation could be demonstrated on the basis of various correlations: School performance of children plays clearly a minor role in the formation of realistic educational aspirations. Thus, despite their children’s weak performance, many migrants form very ambitious educational aspirations. As a result, migrant children go to the Gymnasium even when their school performance in primary school is significantly poorer.

What is the role of migrant’s lack of familiarity with the German school system and migrants’ parental German language skills?

In the literature it has been often assumed that a lack of personal experience with the German school system (measured via school attendance in Germany) contributes not only to an overestimation of school performance of their children, but also increases the aspirations of migrant families. This relationship can be largely shown in the quantitative analysis. In addition, it could be shown that not only the lack of experience with the school system plays a role, but also the lower school involvement of migrant parents due to language barriers (subjectively measured via respective questions in the parent interviews). This could also explain why the overestimation of school performance is particularly evident among immigrants of Turkish origin, who on average have poorer language skills than other immigrant groups (see, for example, Babka von Gostomski 2010). It would therefore be particularly interesting to conduct objective language proficiency tests among immigrant parents to examine these hypotheses. Although such direct language measurements were not available in BiKS-8-18, the findings on self-assessment of parental support potential point to the expected direction: If migrant parents indicated that they were hardly able to support their child in school matters, their educational aspirations were particularly pronounced. Again, this is especially true for parents of Turkish origin, but it is also important for migrant parents without own experience with the German school system. For native parents, on the other hand, the effect of their own ability to provide support points in the opposite direction, which would also be expected in terms of secondary effects of social origin.

Another empirical regularity that proved to be particularly relevant for the group of migrants of Turkish origin is their stronger focus on the child’s perceived enjoyment of school. It appears that parents of Turkish origin tend to use subjective performance indicators rather than objective school performance when forming their educational aspirations. This may also be related to the fact that, especially for parents of Turkish origin, the child’s anticipated school aspirations make a substantial contribution to the explanation of the low secondary effects of ethnicity in the transition decision to secondary school. In future studies, it would therefore be interesting to investigate whether the role of ethnic networks is of particular importance for migrants of Turkish origin (cf. the argumentation in Becker 2010), since as the largest ethnic group in Germany, they can draw much more broadly on their own ethnic community (cf. Haug 2010). Such a pronounced form of ethnic closure could contribute to orientation toward the norms and values prevailing in the social network and thus have a channeling effect on educational aspirations.

How do teacher recommendations at the end of primary school affect children with low social status and migration background (tertiary effect of social background)?

With regard to teacher recommendations in the transition from primary to secondary school, Esser (2011) suggested to speak of a tertiary effect of social origin. It is generally expected that children from families with higher socioeconomic status and better educational attainment are more likely to receive a recommendation for the Gymnasium from their teachers, even if their grades are comparable to those of children from lower social classes. Several explanations for this are offered in the literature. First, teachers expect parents from higher social classes to place more value on education. Second, these parents are expected to be more supportive of their children in high school. Third, teachers attribute lower future academic achievement to children from lower-education and lower-status families (‘statistical discrimination’). And fourth, high status parents put pressure on teachers to get high school recommendations for their children. Although these explanations are generated for social status, similar mechanisms could be assumed for migration status as another social background category as well. However, the third explanation is less convincing, since it is regularly the case in Germany that teachers take over a class as early as the third grade and keep it until the end of primary school. Thus, teachers should have enough time to collect concrete information about the academic performance of their students in the school class in order to be able to make a well-founded recommendation.

A study from the Netherlands in the 1980s showed in addition that children with an immigrant background were even more likely to receive a teacher recommendation to attend a more challenging type of school. The authors of this study suggested a fifth explanation (see Driessen et al. 2008): if the children’s performance levels are the same, teachers assume that migrant children have not yet been able to show their full academic potential because of language problems.

In the empirical analysis with the BiKS-8-18 data on teachers’ preliminary and actual career recommendations, it first appears that the findings are consistent with the first two hypotheses on the importance of social origin, but the third hypothesis does not hold. When children have very good grades, there is no difference between teacher recommendations for the ‘Gymnasium’. However, when children have only “good” or “still good” grades, there are large differences in teacher recommendations between children from lower, middle, or higher social status groups. In general, no particular disadvantages were found for students with an immigrant background (for detailed findings, see Schneider 2011).

What happens to the educational opportunities of migrant children when parents in different federal states are more (e.g., Bavaria) or less (e.g., Hesse) bound by teacher recommendations at the end of primary school?

Teacher recommendations at the end of primary school are more (e.g., in Bavaria) or less (e.g., in Hesse) binding and can therefore be more or less constraining for parents who want to send their children to upper secondary school. Dollmann (2011) shows that for native children, binding teacher recommendations significantly reduce educational inequalities, because the actual educational success of the children is given a higher priority and “overoptimistic” educational aspirations of privileged parents lose some influence. But does this also apply to children with a migration background, especially those from lower social classes and with a low level of education? Probably not, because these parents are “overoptimistic” and their children show lower academic performance on average (Yılmaz et al. 2011). Thus, mandatory teacher recommendations (e.g., in Bavaria) will especially constrain the chances of migrant children from lower social classes, while non-mandatory teacher recommendations (e.g., in Hesse) will provide more room for migrant parents with “overoptimistic” ambitions.

How do the educational aspirations of parents with a migration background change after the children have made the transition to a specific secondary school and families have gained their own experiences with secondary schools (stabilization vs. revision of previous educational decisions)?

Finally, the BiKS Project 7 investigated whether and to which extent educational aspirations of migrant parents change over time in secondary school (see Relikowski 2012 for detailed information on methods and models). The results indicate a general trend towards a decrease in the high aspirations of immigrant parents. The group of migrants of Turkish origin again stands out in particular: If they show particularly high aspirations at the end of the third grade and in the middle of the fourth grade, a comparatively stronger revision of these aspirations occurs with the approaching and completed transition to secondary school, especially when taking into account the child’s social background and school performance. The aspirations that were classified as ‘unrealistically’ high in primary school, especially among parents with Turkish origin, have therefore become increasingly ‘realistic’ in secondary school. Despite this observed ‘revision’ of the initially very ambitious aspirations, however, there is no complete alignment of aspirations with those of native parents. The relevance of migrants’ higher educational aspirations can also be observed after the transition from primary to lower secondary school (Zielonka et al. 2013): a higher (but still small) proportion of these migrant students moves indeed up to higher secondary schools compared to native students. However, no statistically significant difference to native children was found with respect to downward moves to secondary school types—again also after controlling for children’s performance in secondary school.

3 Some Policy Recommendations for Children with Migration Background

At the end of this summary of the empirical findings of BiKS Project 7, it should be emphasized that the realization of all migrant parents’ more ambitious educational goals for their children (low secondary effect) is primarily hampered by their children’s poorer academic performance (strong primary effect). This clearly implies that policy interventions for migrant children, especially migrant children from low social classes, need to focus on the primary effect. Weak immigrant students need earlier, better, and more individualized support from educational institutions throughout their educational careers (e.g., from children’s day care centers, kindergartens, all-day schools, to comprehensive schools). Migrants in particular need more individualized and targeted high-quality German instruction by professionals. The example of Sweden shows (see Erikson and Rudolphi 2010) that reducing achievement gaps between children with native and migrant backgrounds is not entirely beyond the reach of education policy.

In addition, shifting the secondary school career decision to higher ages and more opportunities to revise the school career decision later in secondary school (e.g., second-chance education) could also contribute to more educational equality for children with migrant backgrounds.

Given the high proportion of migrants among unskilled school leavers, it would also be very effective if migrant students with weaker academic performance could receive better information at school about the unique opportunities in the German dual training system and the associated job opportunities. This could reduce the often-frustrating experiences (such as low pay, unskilled work, or high unemployment risks) of immigrant youth when they enter the labor market without vocational qualifications.

However, the quantitative and qualitative strengthening of the preschool sector should not only be central for children with a migration background, but also for native children from disadvantaged families, in order to counteract their unequal starting conditions in the school system (primary effect). In addition, educational policy measures for native children should target their strong secondary effect. This means that policies should lower the cost of education for poor parents from lower social classes and disseminate better information about the education system and the prospects of success in higher secondary schools.

The longitudinal analyses of the BiKS Project 7 reflect the historical situation in Germany in the 2000s. In the meantime, the influx of refugees and migrants has increased enormously, especially in the year 2015 and peaking again in recent days due to the war in Ukraine. Although the migration groups and the reasons for migration differ, most of the mechanisms reported in this paper are useful for the understanding of new migrant children in the German educational system. Certainly, further research is needed in this field. The NEPS (National Educational Panel Study) and its rich longitudinal data pool (which is conceptually reproducing and continuing the BiKS -8-18 Study on a national level) as well as the ReGES Study which addresses Refugees in the German Educational System will help us to improve our knowledge on these issues and policy recommendations. For an introduction and overview on those new studies and updated findings—which go beyond the scope of this volume—see e.g. Diehl et al. (2016), Kalter and Kogan (2020), Miyamoto et al. (2020), as well as Will et al. (2022, 2021, 2018).