Most of the studies presented in this article deal only with the schools of the tripartite system and do not consider students attending a comprehensive.
[3] One of the groups performing least well were students of Italian citizenship, who were more likely to attend a special education school than a Gymnasium.
[3] Second generation Greek students were more likely to attend a Gymnasium (college preparatory school) than their ethnic German counterparts.
[5] No other ethnic group in Germany was as successful as the Vietnamese, 50% of whom attended a Gymnasium, and the Koreans, 70% of whom held at least a high school diploma or higher.
According to a study, academic grades played a vital role in determining whether a student was accepted at the Realschule or Gymnasium.
PISA studies have revealed that youngsters of immigrant backgrounds living in Germany underperformed compared to their peers.
[14] Volker Hagemeister observes that immigrant children in Germany have much less mastery of the language than their counterparts in countries such as Canada or New Zealand, where English is spoken.
First generation immigrants were more likely to be so-called Aussiedler - families from Eastern Europe of full or partial German ancestry who decided to move back to Germany.
According to still another study: After controlling for individual students’ competencies, e.g. their cognitive abilities, the common assumption that children with migration backgrounds are disadvantaged could not be confirmed.
Even a high share of children in a class who do not speak German as a family language does not induce adversarial results in transition recommendations.
In contrast, however, a concentration of high achievement orientation in a class indeed negatively affects transition recommendations: A high share of students with above-average academic achievement, cognitive abilities and achievement-oriented parents actually decreases students’ chances of getting into higher educational tracks (Realschule and Gymnasium instead of Hauptschule).
After controlling for preconditions of learning (such as cognitive ability and number of books possessed by the parents) and performance and standardized reading and math tests provided by the scientists students of group 1, 2 and 3 had the same chances of being admitted at a Gymnasium.
However, according to the study, children who had two parents that were immigrants but spoke German at home (group 4) might be slightly favoured by the system.