Introduction

The goal of this chapter is to describe how researchers in Austria have studied ethnicity and educational inequality between 1980 and 2016 as well as critically assess the reasons for specific research activities and the lack thereof. Even today, Austria still lacks a systematic overview of research in the field of ethnicity/race and educational inequality (for an exception, see Herzog-Punzenberger and Schnell 2014). This is in direct contrast to countries like the United Kingdom or the Netherlands where a strong interest developed in this particular field of enquiry from the 1980s onwards. In recent years, Austrian research on educational inequality has sharply increased parallel to Austria’s participation in international large-scale studies such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), and Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). Furthermore, since 2012 the nationwide standardized surveys (Bildungsstandard-Erhebungen, BIST) were introduced in Grade 4 and Grade 8, covering also proficiency in Mathematics, German and English. These large scale data collections stimulated an additional number of studies on ethnicity/race and educational inequality in Austria.

This contribution is structured as follows: we first provide background information on the Austrian educational system, main immigration periods and outline the most important developments of social policy between 1980 and 2016. Next, we describe how the data gathering for this literature review was applied. The centerpiece of our review is the analysis of five distinct research traditions on ethnicity/race and educational inequality in Austria: the political arithmetic tradition, the family background tradition, the structures of educational systems tradition, the intercultural education and discrimination tradition, and the multilinguality tradition. We concentrate on their major focuses, methods, findings and implications for debates within this field of inquiry. We conclude by summarizing and critically assessing the research traditions explored and provide suggestions for future research on the relationship between race/ethnicity and educational inequality in Austria.

National Context

This section offers a brief overview of the main characteristics of the Austrian educational system, immigration patterns to Austria after World War II, and the development of relevant policies in this field.

Educational System

Full-time compulsory education in Austria starts at age six and lasts nine years until age 15. Primary education takes four years and is the most comprehensive phase in the Austrian system, except for the small percentage selected into special school (Sonderschule) for remedial education. Most primary schools (Volksschule) operate on a half-day basis. Pupils who are classified by teachers as ‘not ready’ spend an additional year in preschool. Since 2008, children have to take a German language test 15 months before entering school. If their German is not at the defined level they are provided with German language support in kindergarten (Stanzel-Tischler 2011). Since 2010, kindergarten attendance is compulsory one year before schooling begins. These measures were introduced with the aim of all children starting their school-career with a reasonable level of German language proficiency. Obligatory kindergarten attendance also for the second year prior to school-start (age four) for children not at a defined level of German language proficiency is subject to on-going educational reforms.

After primary school, at the age of ten, pupils in Austria are streamed into two separate types of school: vocationally (Neue Mittelschule, NMS)Footnote 1 or academically oriented (Allgemeinbildende höhere Schule, AHS-Unterstufe) lower secondary education. The NMS represents the lower tier (formally Hauptschule) and is open to everybody after primary school. In contrast, admission to the academically oriented track, which prepares students to continue in the academically oriented upper secondary school finishing with the university entrance certificate ‘Matura’, depends on marks of the last year of primary school. The scale of assessment ranges from 1 (very good) to 5 (inadequate) and only pupils assessed as ‘very good’ or ‘good’ in German and mathematics may be admitted to the academic secondary school. Teachers can also give a recommendation but these do not have a binding character. Additionally, during compulsory schooling pupils can be classified as not fit for regular school at any time and are consequentially streamed into special school where they receive specific instruction and support. Besides downward streaming, students have to repeat class if they do not meet the demands for a specific year. In the Austrian educational system, most exams are developed, administrated, and evaluated by teachers. Exceptions are the proficiency test carried out in the framework of the standardized national surveys (Bildungsstandardüberprüfung BIST). Those are developed, carried out and analyzed by the Federal Institute of Educational Research, Innovation and Development of the Austrian Education System (BIFIE). They are conceptualized as a monitoring instrument for educational governance and feedback for teachers and administration. Different from other countries, they are not used for evaluative purposes regarding individual pupils. The first standardized national survey took place in spring 2012 in Grade 8 covering mathematics. The survey is designed to cover all students attending a specific grade, except for those with special support in the test-domain, e.g. mathematics. Until then, further standardized tests took place in mathematics Grade 4 (2013), in English Grade 8 (2013), and in German Grade 4 (2015) and Grade 8 (2016). Contrary to other countries, results are not used for evaluative purposes on the level of the students. Students, teachers and school principals can access their individualized results through an individually password-secured web portal. Additionally, results are made public through a series of research reports but only on national and province-level, not at the level of schools. School results are reported to the respective school administration and should also be discussed among parents’ and teachers’ representatives within each school (Schulgemeinschaftsausschuss).

Since compulsory education in Austria lasts until age 15, students who finish Neue Mittelschule (and did not repeat a grade) have to attend another year. Those heading for the labor market attend a one-year preparatory class (Polytechnikum) before continuing with an apprenticeship position to become a skilled worker. The apprenticeship system is a combined three-year period, in firm training with one day per week in school. The pupils streamed into the academic track in lower secondary education predominately move on to the upper secondary level (AHS-Oberstufe) within the same school. In Austria the majority of youth in the upper secondary level is in vocational education and training (VET) whereas only a minority (around 20% of peers in their age group) is in general academic education. VET consists of three separate paths with varying content and credentials. Among them is the apprenticeship path, which trains young adolescents in a certain profession (four days in an enterprise and one day in school) as mentioned above. The apprenticeship path was, for decades, the main path into adulthood for the male population, albeit with widely varying prestige accorded to firms and professions. A parallel path without a position in an enterprise is provided in medium vocational schools lasting three years (BMS). Only the higher technical and vocational colleges (BHS) provide access to tertiary education through the ‘Matura’ diploma. However, from medium vocational school you can change into higher vocational colleges and the apprenticeship path was opened up to a combined path with “Matura” as well. While “upstreaming” was made possible and is advertised a very small minority tries and succeeds.

In 2015, the first centralized graduation exam leading to a university entrance certificate took place (Zentralmatura). Every graduation exam in academic secondary schools (AHS-Oberstufe) and higher technical and vocational colleges (BHS) is now held on the same day. In fact, only one out of three parts is standardized and correction of the standardized part is still undertaken by the classroom teachers themselves.

Tertiary education is two-tiered, consisting of classical universities and so-called ‘Fachhochschulen’. The former offer university programs while the latter are full-time schools where students can extend and refine their skills with a strong labor-market orientation. Once the general university entrance certificate ‘Matura’ is obtained, the student is free to choose their study program and university. Binding entry exams at this point in time only exist for specific study programs, such as medicine and law.

In short, until 2016 the Austrian educational system was characterized by a minimum of one year of compulsory preschool education, early selection at age ten and highly stratified secondary education (Fig. 4.1). The main selection point within the Austrian education system appears at the end of primary education when students are streamed into different ability tracks in lower secondary education. This makes the beginning of the school career an important period that sets the course for subsequent stages. Additionally, ability grouping within or across classrooms was common in non-academically oriented schools, such as lower secondary education or Polytechnikum until recently. With the introduction of the “Neue Mittelschule NMS” a more inclusive orientation was introduced renouncing structures such as ability grouping. Finally, the proportion of private schools accounted around 10% in 2016 (Statistik Austria 2017), the majority of these run by religious congregations.

Fig. 4.1
An illustration of the university entrance requirements in Austria. The Austrian education system. primary level, Lower secondary level, upper secondary level, and post-secondary or tertiary level.

The Austrian educational system. (Source: Austrian Agency for International Cooperation in Education and Research (OeAD-GmbH))

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Migration to Austria

Between the end of World War II and the signing of the State Treaty 1955 approx. Half a million refugees mainly from Eastern Europe were naturalized as Austrian citizens (Fassmann and Münz 1994). Soon afterwards economy was expanding to such an extent that specific industrial sectors required more workers than the domestic labor market could supply. Accordingly, unemployment rates decreased at the end of the 1950s and the recruitment of unskilled labor increased during the 1960s, with official recruitment agreements signed with Spain (1962), Turkey (1964), and Yugoslavia (1966).Footnote 2 The recruitment period finished in 1973 when the oil price shock cut back the economic boom throughout Europe. From 1975 until 1990, migration to Austria and the employment of foreign workers was regulated (and restricted) by the employment law for foreigners and the residence law. Until the break-down of the Eastern bloc in 1989, Austria mostly attracted migrants from Yugoslavia and Turkey. Up to this point, immigration policy was purely conceived as labor market policy and continued to rest on the assumption of the temporary nature of the presence of ‘guest workers’ (Perchinig and König 2003).

After the fall of the iron curtain in 1989 and the collapse of Yugoslavia in 1991, an influx of refugees and immigrants reached Austria. The size of the foreign-born population increased from 5% to almost 9% between 1989 and 1993. Austrian politicians reacted by implementing restrictive migration laws which led to a sharp decrease of inflows from 1994 onwards. In the early 2000s, immigration from other European countries increased (from Germany in particular), including Eastern and South-Eastern European countries which had joined the European Union in 2004 and 2007.

In 2015 and 2016, Austria experienced a large increase of asylum seekers. The situation of violent conflict in many countries of the Middle East but also Afghanistan leads to high levels of migration from the affected regions. Numbers of people travelling overland through Southeastern Europe towards Northwestern Europe rose rapidly during this period. The net inflow of foreign citizens to Austria was + 113,100 in 2015 (Bundesministerium für Inneres 2016, p. 8), with refugees constituting more than half of the influx. The majority of asylum seekers came from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq. The Austrian government decided to curb the inflow of asylum seekers by setting a ceiling of 37,500 for 2016.

Recent statistics classify 21.4% of the current Austrian population as persons with a ‘migration background’ (Bundesministerium für Inneres 2016). This statistical category contains foreign-born as well as native-born with both parents being either foreign-born or holding foreign citizenship (Table 4.1).

Table 4.1 Austrian population with a migration background (2015), by generation and parents’ country of origin (number of persons in 1.000)
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Table 4.1 displays the population with a migration background broken down by generation and parents’ country of origin. Foreign-born persons represented 15.7% of the Austrian population in 2015. Among them, the majority originates from non-EU-27 countries. Table 4.1 additionally provides the percentages of first generation immigrants from (former) Yugoslavia (6%) and Turkey (3.2%), who still represent two of the largest labor migrant groups in Austria. The predominance of former Yugoslavian immigrants in the Austrian population is also reflected in the size of second-generation immigrants with 1.8%, and the second-generation Turkish population as somewhat smaller, comprising 1.4% of the Austrian population. Compared to other North-Western European countries, the number of children of immigrants in Austria is still small (5.6% of the total population).

The classification available is by ‘first language’, ‘first’ in this case refers to the biographical timing of language acquisition.Footnote 3 As shown in Table 4.2, almost 23% of the total population of pupils in Austria had a first language other than German (234,901 pupils). The proportion has more than doubled within the last 20 years, indicating that children of immigrants are entering schools in steadily increasing numbers. This trend is reflected to differing extents in different school types and tracks. In primary schools, the percentage of non-German mother tongue pupils grew from 11% in 1994 to 28% in 2015 and from the considerably higher level of 18% to 32% in special schools (Sonderschulen); however, although the percentages of pupils with a first language other than German in academic-oriented educational tracks (BHS and AHS-Oberstufe) has increased fivefold, it still lags behind with 17%. As in many metropolitan cities, the situation in Vienna is quite different. The majority is multilingual, so that, on average, monolingual German-speakers are the minority. This pattern is also reflected among Viennese pupils. Every second student in Grade 4 in 2015 was multilingual (Breit et al. 2016).

Table 4.2 Proportion of students with colloquial languages other than German by school-type across selected years
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The number of refugee children (refugee youth or descendants of asylum seekers) has more than doubled between fall 2015 and summer 2016. By the beginning of October 2015, around 5800 refugee children were enrolled in Austrian schools. In June 2016, the number of refugee children in compulsory education increased to around 14,200. The largest proportion of school aged refugee children can be found in Vienna, followed by Lower and Upper Austria (Bundesministerium für Bildung 2016).

While migrants and their descendants are sometimes called ‘new’ minorities, Austria also has a number of ‘old’ minorities. Following gradual recognition in legal texts, there are now six officially recognized minorities: Carinthian Slovenes, Burgenland Croats, Hungarians, Roma, Czechs and Slovaks. They are a reminder that state borders are artificial lines of separation and that settlement patterns have been mixed concerning linguistic and ethnic diversity. There is no reliable data on the size of the minorities and it appears, given the estimates on language use, that none of these groups exceeds 50,000 people, while some probably comprise less than 10,000 people (Luciak 2008, p. 46). The ‘old’ minorities have special rights in Austria to date which are built on either the 1955 State Treaty or the 1976 Ethnic Minorities Act. In school matters, the respective provinces adopted Minority Schools Acts in 1959 (Carinthia) and 1994 (Burgenland) so that instruction in designated primary and secondary schools can be either bilingual or in one of the minority languages of the region. Interestingly enough, the share of students attending these schools or classes is rising, even when teachers report that a majority of the pupils have little or no knowledge of the minority language upon registration (Landesschulrat für Kärnten 2016).

Policy Development in the Field of Education and Research

In the field of education and ethnic diversity, the Austrian school system offers – at least since the beginning of the 1990s – three distinct approaches (cf. Luciak and Kahn-Svik 2008): (a) minority language schooling for autochthonous ethnic minorities, (b) educational provision for migrants, and (c) intercultural education for all pupils. Until the beginning of the 1990s, policies towards foreign nationals were characterized by the ‘guest worker’ idea, which was originally built on the rotation principle, i.e. that migrant workers will stay for one year, and then return home. Therefore, their children, if not ignored by educational politicians, were to be prepared for their return home even when they stayed for many years. As the number of migrant children steadily increased from the 1970s onwards, three measures were applied: (i) support in learning the language of instruction, i.e. German, (ii) support in learning the mother tongue and knowledge about the country of origin, (iii) extra-matricular status for those who could not follow instruction in German. The extra-matricular status was meant to protect children that could not understand the language of instruction and comprised a first phase of 12 months with the possibility of prolongation for another 12 months. Additional support in learning German was offered for two to three hours per week on average while legal provisions allowed for 11 hours per week with up to 18 hours in special cases. The implementation of the defined legal provision generally failed due to lack of resources. In 1980/1981 the Viennese school administration reacted to the growing numbers of migrants, who tended to cluster in specific neighborhoods and schools, by installing an additional model: the accompanying teacher (Begleitlehrer). This meant that a second teacher worked with the migrant children in the classroom during regular teaching hours where possible using the pupils’ mother tongue (Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian, Turkish).

From the mid-1970s until 1990, instruction in Serbo-Croatian or Turkish language, history and culture was provided by the two ‘sending’ countries of the ‘guest workers’, Yugoslavia and Turkey, for three to five hours per week. Not only textbooks, but also teachers were sent to Austria by the two state administrations. Finally, in 1992, the above mentioned instruments of extra-matricular status, support in German language learning and mother tongue instruction, were regularized in the Austrian school-system, therefore decoupling it from the sending countries. Adding onto 12 existing principles of instruction, such as health, peace, environment, and traffic, a new one was introduced: intercultural education. As it became part of the curriculum’s general objectives it had to be implemented in the didactic process of each subject (Bundesgesetzblatt II 277/2004).

As neither the German remedial classes (or the alternative form of accompanying multilingual teachers in classrooms) nor the mother tongue courses were compulsory nor guaranteed, their implementation in school was dependent on organizational matters such as the number of children in need and the individual commitment of teachers or headmasters. Without any justification, funding for the different forms of support was cut every few years between the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s. Only in 2006/2007 additional funds for remedial teaching in German were made available, with the Ministry of Education being required to biannually apply to the Ministry of Finance for continuation. Despite the persistent rhetoric about the importance of German proficiency the implementation of these instruments and funds never was monitored by school administration or made accessible for research. Most pupils with a non-German mother-tongue report that they have never received special support in learning German (as a second language) in school (Herzog-Punzenberger 2017c), only half of the teachers in classrooms with multilingual pupils have had training in the topic “German as a second language” (Salchegger et al. 2015).

In recent educational reforms it has been decided that the time-span for evaluating the proficiency in German and other competencies of children will be expanded. From 2016 onwards, children aged 3.5 will receive an educational compass (Bildungskompass), a document in which accumulated needs are recorded for each child. The early notification of needs should help to set up individualized support measures before entering primary school. After kindergarten, the educational compass will be carried on by the school personal until the end of compulsory schooling.

Between 2007 and 2017 the Austrian ministry of education had a strong emphasis on inclusive education in its broad understanding of individual needs and support encompassing students with migration background (Fraundorfer 2011). Among other things the aim was to include language sensitive teaching as a basic competence in the professional self-understanding of teachers in general. The Federal Center for Interculturality, Migration and Multilinguality (Bundeszentrum für Interkulturalität, Migration und Mehrsprachigkeit), a new resource center, was established to organize related activities in teacher education institutions. Another resource center, the Austrian language competence center (Österreichisches Sprachenkompetenzzentrum ÖSZ), formerly only targeting foreign language instruction, was reorganized subsequently focusing on instruction in multilingual classrooms, developing material and offering courses. Additionally, in the new teacher training introduced in 2015 language- and culture-sensitive teaching as part of the principle of inclusion should be a cross-cutting topic in all subjects. Little is known, however, about the implementation in the different teacher education institutions and courses so far.

Finally, in order to support schools with a high number of refugee children and their additional needs, supplementary school funds of around 64 Million € (2016) and 80 Million € (2017) were made available (Budgetdienst 2016). Provision is made for German literacy classes, language assistance, extra pedagogical personal and further integration measures in schools. Supplementary funds will be allocated based on a weighted formula (Sozialindex), taking into account the percentage of pupils having a first language other than German as well as the percentage of socioeconomically disadvantaged families at the respective school.

Methodology

In order to achieve a systematic sampling approach of relevant literature on educational inequality and race/ethnicity between 1980 and 2016 in Austria, this study followed the guidelines developed by Stevens (2007) and Stevens et al. (2009). Five major criteria of inclusion guided the first steps in our review process. First, only literature focusing on Austria as a research context is included. Second, the review investigates studies that primarily research educational inequalities and race/ethnicity within a sociological framework. At the same time, the academic production in Austria has been quite limited and dominated by particular personalities who were also situated in disciplines other than sociology. In fact, as the boundaries between the disciplines are rather blurred in cross-cutting topics such as migration and ethnicity, we include researchers and contributions from neighboring disciplines. Third, this review captures both ‘old’ and ‘new’ minorities in Austria, highlighting the importance of the political framework and historic development of group-relationship for the situation of children from ethnic minorities in Austrian schooling. Fourth, we review studies on primary as well as (lower and upper) secondary schooling since research was not differentiated into educational levels. Finally, we take peer-reviewed journals, (edited) books, book sections and official reports as primary sources. For the time periods until the end of the 1990s, we additionally consider unpublished but officially available reports that had an impact on educational inequalities and race/ethnicity research in Austria.

The sampling of specific research contributions consisted of four specific steps: As suggested by Stevens and colleagues (2007, 2009), we started with the major databases (i.e. ERIC, JSTOR, etc.) and went on to the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI), where only one relevant journal appeared.Footnote 4 In order to maximize our sample, we identified a list with over ten journals which were frequently cited in relevant studies on race/ethnicity and educational inequality in Austria. On the basis of this selection, we identified further relevant and important studies that were cited in the journal articles. As a last step, we employed detailed research on Austrian-specific bibliographic databases to classify additional studies, books, and reports relevant to our field of inquiry. Based on the publications found through this first round of sampling, we developed a detailed list with search strings to be used for re-contacting the above-named databases, which yielded a number of additional sources found within this second round of sampling.

Most of the contributions cited here were published in books or pedagogically oriented journals and mostly only from the 1990s onwards with a sharp increase during the 2000s. The dominant language of the publication in the sample is German rather than English. It is further important to note that cross-country studies are important for the context of Austria in relation to the literature on race and ethnic inequalities, which is why we included key publications in this review.

Research on Race/Ethnicity and Educational Inequality in Austria

Now we will summarize the result of our literature review. We identified five research traditions over the last 36 years.

The first research tradition, which we call (i) political arithmetic tradition (PA) due to great similarities with equivalent research traditions in countries like the United Kingdom and the Netherlands (Stevens 2007; Stevens et al. 2009), examines studies and reports that describe rather than explain how students of different race/ethnic backgrounds perform and participate in the Austrian educational system. While this tradition started with the very first publications on migrant education in Austria at the beginning of the 1980s, it is overwhelmingly based on quantitative analyses with large-scale surveys following either Austria’s participation in international studies (PISA, PIRLS, TIMSS) or the recent implementation of national tests (BIST). This tradition has also gained importance over the past fifteen years outside the specialist discourse due to the prominence of representative surveys on educational outcomes in public media.

The second research tradition, (ii) family background tradition (FB), primarily investigates underachievement in education by considering the socio-economic position of the parental generation as well as related resources (cultural and social capital). This tradition has grown, side by side, with the prominence of large-scale surveys within the last decade. Thus, the great majority of studies in the FB tradition employ quantitative research designs, while qualitative and ethnographic studies are scarce.

The third research tradition investigates the impact of features and institutional arrangements of the Austrian educational system in producing educational inequalities. Therefore, we call it the structures of educational systems (SOES) tradition (iii). In this category, we include research on organizational structures like age of first selection, duration of schooling and half- or whole-day schooling. This is mostly analyzed with statistical methods.

The fourth research tradition, entitled (iv) intercultural education and discrimination tradition (IED), is centered around intercultural learning as a principle of instruction and includes topics such as the (lack of) implementation, teachers’ actions and attitudes, and discrimination in textbooks. It builds on concepts of cultural anthropology and employs participatory observation, interviews, questionnaires, and discourse analyses.

The fifth and final research tradition is the (v) multilinguality tradition (ML), which focuses on the development of multilinguality in Austrian schools either by concentrating on the language development of multilingual children or by depicting the implementation of the support measures for the language development of the pupils and their multilinguality. While the first strand in this tradition builds on linguistic methodology complemented by sociolinguistics, the second strand is following a broad social-science approach which uses document analyses, case analyses, and thick description.

The boundaries of these research traditions are not always clear cut. Most traditions interact with each other and in some cases it is quite hard to decide which tradition is more dominant in the particular research. Similarities, influences, and overlaps will be pointed out in the analyses and highlighted in the conclusion. An additional remark concerns the time dimension. Most of the traditions are particularly strong in a specific period closely tied to political developments and public discourse. Therefore, it is necessary to provide information on the historical context in which these traditions unfold before they are described in terms of methods, outcomes and related debates.

Political Arithmetic Tradition

In the 1980s many European countries began to examine several types of inequalities and evaluate social policy initiatives: national governments stimulated and financed large-scale surveys which allowed quantitative analysis of the educational attainment and progress of ethnic minority groups; yet, similar developments were almost non-existent in Austria. However, the few publications on the education of the children of ‘guest workers’ did not fail to show the detrimental situation in schools or reference the discriminatory societal structures (Matuschek 1982; Fischer 1986; Viehböck and Bratic 1994). Based on accessible datasets from school administration, censuses, or micro-censuses, social science researchers from different disciplines described the situation of migrant children in Austrian schools; namely, unequal distribution across school types, over-representation in special schools, high repetition rates, large presence in low-prestige vocationally oriented schools, and large numbers leaving the educational system without any degree at all. Parallel to similar research traditions in the UK and the Netherlands, we call this research the political arithmetic tradition. It is defined by quantitative analyses with large datasets either with full coverage from school- or census-statistics or representative samples taken from national (micro-census) or international surveys (European Household Panel). Studies in the PA tradition increased substantially with the availability of national samples from large-scale assessment studies, such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), and nationwide test-data (Bildungsstandardsüberprüfung BIST).

These phenomena were most pronounced among the children of the labor migrants from Turkey and the former Yugoslavia. Academically oriented schools (those granting a university entrance certificate) were called ‘foreigner free’ until the beginning of the 1990s (1980–2000) (DeCillia 1994), with only 4% of pupils having a mother tongue other than German in 1992 (Perchinig 1995, p. 133). The national averages, however, are fictitious values as there are and always were pronounced regional differences, with the federal state Vienna showing much higher proportions of immigrant children in schools. Nevertheless, large unequal distribution among different groups of origin have been observed in Vienna too: 33% of all pupils attended academically oriented schools in Vienna but only 8% of ex-Yugoslavian and 4% of Turkish pupils did (own calculations based on Gröpel 1999, p. 301).

In the early 2000s, Austrian researchers from various fields (sociology, political sciences, and econometrics) started to show different aspects or changes over time. Herzog-Punzenberger (2003a) showed that at the beginning of the 2000s school success among the adult second generation was colored by the segregated school system. Among young adults aged 15–34 years born in Austria to Turkish parents or having immigrated before starting school, less than 0.5% held an academic degree, only 4% a university entrance certificate (AHS, BHS), and just as few a medium-level degree from a vocationally oriented school (BMS) (cf. p. 33). Finally, she was the first to look at the numbers of students with a migration background undergoing teacher education. At that point in time there were two students with Turkish citizenship heading for the teaching profession while the number of pupils with a Turkish migration background in Austrian schools had reached 30,000 (cf. p. 26). Starting from an alarming situation Biffl (2004) documented an increase in participation rates of the Turkish and former Yugoslavian student population (aged 15–24) in the Austrian educational system and a decrease of educational inequalities during the 1980ies and 1990ies (1981–2002). She further observed a shift in highest school-certificates from lower basic towards vocational-oriented medium and upper secondary schools among immigrant origin students. As in many other cases (Felderer and Hofer 2004) she based her trend analysis on a broad categorization of children of Turkish and former Yugoslavian foreigners without considering the age of the children on arrival or the effect of excluding naturalized children.

Later on, through the availability of the census data from 2001 and the question on everyday language use allowing for more than one language, more precise analyses were possible targeting the second generation born in Austria (Herzog-Punzenberger 2007). It was shown that the share of female second generation in higher education was larger than that of their male counter-parts in all ethnic groups observed (Turkish, former Yugoslavian, natives) (cf. p. 94). These studies conclude that while progress compared to their parents’ generation (Herzog-Punzenberger 2003a, b) and the first cohorts of the children of migrants (Biffl 2004) can be observed, striking disadvantage is continuing especially among academic-oriented tracks. In the first survey focusing on second generation immigrants (n = 1000) in Austria in the age-group 16–26 years old, findings on the over-representation of immigrants in lower tracks were confirmed (Weiss 2007) and regional differences were observed with lower disparities occurring between majority and minority youth in Vienna than in the western federal states of Salzburg, Tyrol, and Vorarlberg (Unterwurzacher 2007). Although these studies were of great importance in continuing to highlight trends in ethnic educational inequalities, no information on competences, marks, or prior experiences were available for ethnic minority students.

The PA Tradition in the Large-Scale Assessment Period

The number of studies that can be classified within the PA tradition in Austria sharply increased from the mid-2000s onward through the use of large-scale assessment (LSA) studies like PISA, PIRLS, and TIMSS. Those studies not only consist of standardized achievement tests but also include context questionnaires with a wide range of information on school and family. A second advantage is the possibility to statistically differentiate pupils with migration background according to country of birth, parents’ country of birth, age of arrival, participation in kindergarten and citizenship.

Starting with the first PISA survey (2000), achievement differences between immigrants and the majority of the student population aged 15–16 were reported for reading, mathematics, and (natural) science, and socio-economic and other information on migrant families was described in a new way (Blüml 2002; Burtscher 2004; Reiter 2002a, b). These analyses occurred for every PISA wave in short one year after the survey and in depth in more substantial reports usually three years after the survey (based on PISA 2003; see Breit and Schreiner 2006; Schreiner 2006; Schreiner and Breit 2006; based on PISA 2006; see Breit 2009; Herzog-Punzenberger and Unterwurzacher 2009; Schmid et al. 2009; based on PISA 2009; see Schwantner and Schreiner 2010; based on PISA 2012; see Schwantner et al. 2013; Schreiner et al. 2014; based on PISA 2015; see Suchan and Breit 2016).

The findings of the PISA studies revealed that the proportion of 15–16-year-old immigrant students in Austria has grown over the last fifteen years. In 2000, they represented around 11% of the total student population, while, according to 2015 data, they account for 20.3% (Salchegger et al. 2016). Among them, the proportion of second generation immigrants has increased over time while numbers of first generation immigrants has decreased. From 2000 to 2015, the number of second generation immigrants aged 15–16 grew from 4% in 2000 to almost 13% in 2015 (cf. p. 91).

Much of the analytical emphasis has been on reading literacy, observable achievement differences, and co-occurrence of diverse factors. Within the six PISA waves to date, children of immigrants have been found to significantly underperform against the majority of the student population. Special attention has been drawn to children of immigrants born in Austria, the so-called second generation, who were found to perform on average among the worst in Europe (OECD 2006). Overall, the findings on the reading abilities of second generation immigrants did not show substantial progress between the years 2000 and 2006 (compare Table 4.3). The picture changes from 2009 onwards with literacy test results indicating a reduction in the achievement gap between migrant and native students. While average reading competencies remain constant for the majority student population in the last fifteen years, reading skills improved significantly for children of immigrants. Breaking the achievement gaps into ethnic groups, findings revealed that children of Turkish origin in particular face the greatest literacy problems. At the same time, trend analysis across PISA waves reveals that children of Turkish origin did show the greatest improvement in reading skills between 2009 and 2012 (Salchegger et al. 2015). Although achievement gaps have been found to decrease in the last 10 years, children of immigrants still significantly underperform against the majority student population in Austria (compare Table 4.3).

Table 4.3 Average achievements by survey, immigrant generation, type of achievement and year
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With other international large scale studies investigating reading (PIRLS), mathematics and natural sciences competencies (TIMMS) of students in their final year before leaving primary school (aged nine to ten), reporting on ethnic educational inequalities among younger age-cohorts became feasible on a quantitative and representative basis (Bergmüller and Herzog-Punzenberger 2012a, b; Breit and Wanka 2010; Herzog-Punzenberger and Gapp 2009; Salchegger et al. 2015; Salchegger et al. 2017; Unterwurzacher 2009). Similar to PISA, the analyses of these data suggest that children of immigrants show on average lower competencies in reading, mathematics and natural sciences than their Austrian counterparts (compare Table 4.3). More precisely, according to the most recently available national PIRLS report (Salchegger et al. 2017), children of immigrants are more than three times as often represented in the ‘at risk’ group of students in reading (around 35% in the group at risk compared to 10% in the overall peer group).

An almost identical result is found in the nationwide BIST-survey. According to the most recently available national report (Breit et al. 2017), 27% of all children of immigrants do not meet the school-standards in reading (German) in Grade 4 compared to 10% in the overall peer group. Instead, the group of ‘high achievers’ (exceeding the standard levels in reading) is composed of 94% non-immigrant students. Standardized national tests have been carried out since 2012, when all students in Austrian schools attending Grade 8 have been assessed in mathematics for the first time. Until then, further standardized exams took place in mathematics for Grade 4 (2013), in English for Grade 8 (2013), and in German for Grade 4 (2015) and Grade 8 (2016). These nationwide school-standards have three goals: (1) monitoring outcomes of classrooms and schools for political decision-makers and administrations, (2) providing feedback to teachers and head-masters through comparable results, (3) navigating paedagogues towards competence-based teaching. Findings are used for quality development purposes in schools as well as for regular reports on educational performances and related inequalities. (Schreiner and Breit 2013; Schreiner and Breit 2014a, b; Breit et al. 2016, 2017). Ultimately, they are the most important data-bases for equity-related analyses and interventions.

Unlike in large scale assessments of international studies where sample-sizes do not allow break-downs in different school-types, several language-groups or administrative units the BIST-test is a full census of the Grade and therefore allows fine-grained analyses. It is worth noting that achievement differences appear between school tracks in Grade 8. The performance gap in German (reading), for example, is larger between children with and without migration background in new secondary schools (Neue Mittelschule) with 76 points. than in the academically orientated track AHS-Unterstufe (54 points). Another BIST finding reveals that competences in mathematics vary among children of immigrants to a very large degree depending on country of origin/language (Herzog-Punzenberger 2017a). While children from Eastern European migrants show higher competences on average in several cities or smaller administrative units than monolingual native students in mathematics this is less the case among children from Turkish migrants. In English multilingual pupils from specific language-groups have higher results on a national level than monolingual native students with Polish, Hungarian, Czech and Slovak-speaking pupils performing best. Besides these findings on test results, the BIST reports and related BIST analyses shed light on many other details in education, i.e. language diversity and bilingualism among children of immigrants in Austria. Findings reveal that the proportion of children who are bilingual speakers from birth onwards (German and another language), varies substantially across ethnic origin groups, ranging from 15% bilingual descendants from Turkish families to 32% among children of Filipino-parents (Herzog-Punzenberger 2017b) (Table 4.4).

Table 4.4 Average achievements in school-standards and performances, by immigrant status, type of achievement, grade and year
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Recent analyses using BIST data indicates that classroom composition has a large effect on proficiency in different domains independent from individual characteristics (Bruneforth et al. 2012). In mathematics, half of the difference in test results comparing two pupils with similar family background characteristics can be explained by the share of pupils with low socio-economic background and migration background in their respective classrooms—the higher the share the lower the test results (Biedermann et al. 2016)

In sum, the PA tradition in Austria during the first two decades of the reviewed time span (1980–2000) indicates the law, the labor market, the housing situation, discrimination, and the structure of the school system as reasons for the differences in access, participation, and eventual qualification of youths with or without migration background. However, with the turn of the century a new era started. Especially with the large scale assessment data from PISA starting in the year 2000 and later on also PILRS, TIMSS and the testing of the national education standards the Austrian PA tradition became a standard in national reporting on equity related to social and migration background. These data were used to examine achievement differences in several subjects (mathematics, science, German, English as a foreign language) with the data from the national education standards testing BIST allowing fine-grained differentiation between more than a dozen language-groups, age at arrival, school-type participation and administrative units next to social background and gender.

Family Background Tradition

Research on family background characteristics and ethnic inequalities in education evolved side by side with the PA tradition in Austria. First empirical results had been published by the end of the 1990s (e.g. Gröpel et al. 1999), the increasing availability of large-scale quantitative datasets led to considerable growth from the 2000s onwards (in particular through PISA, PIRLS, TIMSS or BIST). Researchers investigated the significance of parental socio-economic background, social and cultural capital, or material resources to explain the educational underachievement of children of immigrants in Austrian schools. Given the high correlation between the FB and PA traditions, studies in the family background tradition almost exclusively employ quantitative research designs to investigate inequalities in educational attainment, transition rates between educational tracks, and achievement at certain educational stages.

Parental Socio-Economic Background

Due to the predominant position of first generation immigrants in the lower social strata in Austria, focusing on parental socio-economic background has been seen as a promising path to pinpointing further mechanisms in explaining the educationally disadvantaged position of their children. This line of argument also traces the structural position of immigrant groups within Austrian society, considering either their time of arrival, the general skills first generation immigrants brought with them, or the fit between their skills and their ability to fill certain needs in local economies. Although not directly labeled as a ‘social class versus culture’ debate, the majority of studies follow this line of argumentation by employing multivariate regression analysis to show the relative impact of different factors. Socio-economic background (measured as parental occupational status and educational attainment) regularly plays a more important role in significant correlations with educational outcomes than other variables such as language spoken at home, foreign-born parents or country of birth (of parents). To give a few examples, various studies have observed ethnic minorities’ disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds account for a considerable part of achievement differences in reading and mathematics at the end of primary (Bacher 2010; Breit and Wanka 2010; Unterwurzacher 2009) and secondary education (Bacher 2005, 2006, 2008, 2009; Wroblewski 2006; Breit and Wanka 2010; Salchegger et al. 2015, 2017), at transition points from primary to lower and upper secondary education (Bacher 2003, 2005; Leitgöb et al. 2014; Schnell and Crul 2014; Unterwurzacher 2007), early school leaving (Moser et al. 2016; Schnell 2015), in linguistic development (Khan-Svik 2007; Korecky-Kröll et al. 2016), and on final educational attainment (Schnell 2015; Weiss 2006, 2007a; Weiss and Unterwurzacher 2007).

These quantitative studies do not come without methodological caveats. A great number of studies treat ethnic inequality in a dichotomous way – achievement of the Austrian students on the one side and achievement of children with a ‘migration background’ or ‘children with a foreign mother tongue’ on the other side – while detailed analyses looking closer into the heterogeneity of immigrant groups became more frequent in the past ten years. Using their own survey on various second generation immigrant groups in Austria, Unterwurzacher’s (2007, 2009) and Weiss’ (2006) findings suggest that enrollment differences for the academic-oriented track at the first transition point at age ten can largely be explained by SES for former Yugoslavian and other immigrant descendants but to a lesser degree for second generation Turks (Unterwurzacher 2007). The persistent ‘Turkish disadvantage’ was also observed in reading achievements in Grade 4 using PIRLS 2007 (Unterwurzacher 2009) and final educational attainment (Weiss and Unterwurzacher 2007). More recent research, however, highlights improvements among Turkish descendants in reading skills despite unchanged SES (Salchegger et al. 2015).

Social and Cultural Capital

Current debates on ethnic educational inequalities in Austria are motivated by the question of how to describe the remaining variation in educational outcomes net of socio-economic differences in the family of origin. Whether specific cultural resources in the family would enhance educational success has been put to the test using Austrian LSA datasets in particular (Bacher 2008; Breit and Wanka 2010; Wroblewski 2006; Wallner-Paschon et al. 2017). Studies using PISA data examined strong effects of ‘cultural capital’ in explaining achievement differences in reading and mathematics among Austrian and immigrant students at the age of 15 beyond socio-economic background (Bacher 2008). The lack of cultural resources has been found to explain a large proportion of the disparities in mathematics (Breit and Wanka 2010; Wroblewski 2006; Salchegger et al. 2016) and reading abilities (Unterwurzacher 2009; Salchegger et al. 2017). However, these quantitative analyses using large-scale surveys are rather limited in explaining the direct relationship between parenting behavior and educational outcomes. Exceptions are recently published studies on schooling success by second generation immigrant students. Schnell (2015) explores the school-related involvement strategies and patterns of support provided within Turkish families by parents and older siblings. Family involvement is conceptualised as a multidimensional construct, including parental control and instrumental support. Using data from the TIES survey, the study shows a high magnitude of the correlates between parental and siblings involvement and certain compositional family factors. Results suggest further that the educational attainment of second-generation Turks in Austria is highly dependent on various activities of support provided by their parents when compared to their non-immigrant counterparts. Immigrant parents indeed lack relevant resources to support their children in schooling activities. Due to low educational levels or limited language abilities in German they are less often found to help their children with homework or attend parent-teacher conferences. But at the same time, high parental aspirations and strong emotional bonds between family members can lead to higher aspirations among the children themselves and therefore foster social mobility in the Austrian educational system or prevent children from leaving school early – a finding that is in line with a number of qualitative studies (Atac and Lageder 2009; Kircil 2016; Nairz-Wirth and Meschnig 2015; Pásztor 2016; Rieser 2011; Waechter et al. 2007). Besides the parents, the elder siblings often act as role models and provide their younger brothers and sisters with relevant information and support for schooling activities, which makes them as effective as parents. Older siblings can act as intermediaries between younger children and their school, and their own schooling experiences can be a major source of support (Schnell 2015; Waechter et al. 2007). Finally, a limited number of studies have highlighted that, in addition to family members, peers and teachers sometimes offer additional forms of support that are of great importance for immigrant children to successfully navigate the Austrian school system (Atac and Lageder 2009; Burtscher 2009, 2010; Schnell 2014).

In public discourse, parents’ lack of fluency in the language of instruction in school (German) is one of the most prominent explanations for educational inequality although not empirically proven for data in Austria. Lack of information about the educational system on the parents’ side as well as lack of communication between schools and parents was subject of analyses before the LSAs, albeit in a heuristic way (Gröpel et al. 1999; Matuschek 1982). More recently, studies conducted by Brizic and colleagues on language development in primary school children included parents and teachers in the study (Brizic 2007; Brizic and Hufnagel 2011, 2016). With quantitative and qualitative methodology, Brizic found out that parents’ attitudes towards education as perceived by the teachers had no impact on the language development of the children. At the same time, the teachers’ perceptions of the parents’ attitudes and the parents’ factual attitudes towards education were rather different. While the teachers had a more positive appraisal of parents from the former Yugoslavia, Turkish parents were in fact more interested in educational issues. In most cases of children with language development difficulties, teachers and parents were caught in misperceptions of both, each other and the educational system, which in some cases resulted in distrust. Both, however, felt helpless and thought the solution would only come about through changes made by the other (Brizic 2007).

Overall, research on the significance of family background characteristics in explaining ethnic disparities in education has grown substantially over the last decade with the increasing availability of relevant quantitative survey data. Recent research within the FB tradition has paid particular attention to the role played by social and cultural capital in exploring the complex relationship between social class origin, ethnicity, and educational achievement. But small-scale ethnographic or qualitative studies exploring the relationship between social origin, ethnicity, and educational achievement are still scarce in Austria.

The Structure of Educational Systems Tradition

Parallel to studies in general migration research, where outcomes on an aggregate level such as naturalized immigrants’ highest educational degrees or social mobility rates are often connected to the broader societal framework, researchers in the field of education also look at the macro-level and analyze the institutional arrangements of the educational system. While not all of the characteristics of educational systems have been scrutinized in the context we are discussing, the following should be mentioned:

  1. 1.

    Kindergarten: starting age, duration (opening hours), availability, quality.

  2. 2.

    Primary education: starting age, downgrading in pre-phase (Vorschulstufe), duration, repetition rates, selection into special school, half-day schooling.

  3. 3.

    Secondary education: age at first selection, tracking, half-day schooling, short duration of compulsory schooling, permeability.

These issues came up for debate long before the school success of migrant children was considered. In the 1970s, a particularly intensive and ideological discussion raged over class-based educational inequality, with a focus on early differentiation at age ten, also called ‘tracking’. This form of school organization has been anchored in the constitutional law for decades, and changes to the system would require a parliamentary majority, something still unlikely to happen in the near future despite growing evidence for the advantages of late tracking.

During the last two decades (2000–2016), the question of the structural characteristics of educational systems gained importance in explaining educational outcomes more generally, not least driven by international comparative large-scale assessments such as PISA (OECD 2005, 2015a, b). Nevertheless, in most of the research designs, this has not been the starting point for explaining the disadvantages of students with a migration background. The first research project to do this was TIES (the Integration of the European Second Generation, www.tiesproject.eu) which compared young adults with parents from Turkey/former Yugoslavia/Morocco to those with native parents in different education systems (Crul et al. 2012; Schnell 2014; Schnell and Crul 2014). Until then, it was rather a by-product of acknowledging the class-based character in much of the research on race and ethnicity in Austria. However, the selectivity of the school system has been criticized in Austria for decades. Generally, it has an inherent logic of down-streaming, i.e. it is very unlikely that a pupil changes to a higher-status school (low degree of permeability). The main criticism was the socially reproductive logic of the school system in terms of family background (Bacher 2003, 2005, 2006).

Since the 1980s, researchers have addressed institutional ramifications as driving forces for disadvantages in the educational participation and results of children with a migration background (Matuschek 1982; Fischer 1986; Khan-Svik 1999, pp. 186–197; Gröpel 1999; Volf and Bauböck 2001). They criticized the individualizing perspective which either stressed the deficits of the child or the family – something quite common at that time in the German-speaking pedagogical literature. Instead, they tried to show that the selectivity of the Austrian school system was the reason for the over-representation of children of migrants in lower status school types with a lower standard curriculum, i.e. the vocational-oriented track in lower secondary school (Hauptschule) and special school (Sonderschule). Khan-Svik (1999, pp. 187–188) and Gröpel (2001, p. 220) applied the theory of ‘Unterschichtung’, meaning that when a group of people enters a stratified system at the lowest rank this will enable those who formerly were at the bottom to enter the next stratum (Baker and Lenhardt 1988, p. 40, cited in Gröpel 2001, p. 221). For the school system, this meant that children from immigrant families, who occupied the lowest societal status at that time, would have a higher likelihood of being deferred to the lowest positions in the school system and those native children who were previously at the lowest ranks, i.e. in Sonderschule or in Hauptschule, then had a smaller chance of being down-streamed and a better chance of moving to a higher status school. They presumed an economic logic in educational organization, where pupils are channelled accordingly. For further reasons, they pointed to the fact that support measures for children with a first language other than German were not adequate, preschool in particular was described as an ‘Aufbewahrungsstätte’ (place of custody) rather than a support center, which among other things explained the extremely high share of students with migration background who had to repeat a class. Gröpel (2001, p. 219) also mentioned the limited places in institutions of early childhood education and care (Kindergartenplätze) as well as high fees which obviously would decrease the likelihood of the children of migrants participating.

The situation has improved since then with increasing participation rates in Kindergarten for children of immigrants, especially among the second generation. Using BIST data, Herzog-Punzenberger (2016) indicated that over 90% of the second generation attended Kindergarten in the early 2000s, irrespective of the ethnic origin. Minor differences appeared, however, in the duration. More than four out of ten native children attended Kindergarten three or more years (44%) while only 38% of the descendants of immigrants entered Kindergarten with the age of four or earlier. Although participation rates and duration in Kindergarten increased, descendants of immigrants have been found to not profit from it in the same way as native children – especially when originating from disadvantaged families. For example, attending pre-school more than one year did positively affect academic achievements of all students in Grade 4 as compared to those previously not attending Kindergarten. However, the positive effect is smaller for children of immigrants and for children originating from low class backgrounds. This finding might be related to the quality (e.g. number of support personal, paedagogical concepts, activities) and type of pre-schools that seem to differ between children of immigrants and their native counterparts (Bruneforth et al. 2012; Herzog-Punzenberger and Schnell 2012; Herzog-Punzenberger 2016).

Selection mechanisms penalize pupils with migration background systematically as can be shown with rates in pre-school and special education schools but also in repetition rates. In 1995 (TIMSS) pupils in Grade 4 had already a threefold likelihood of delay in their school career if both parents were immigrants, i.e. 41% compared to 14% of pupils with at least one native-born parent (Bergmüller and Herzog-Punzenberger 2012b). In 2011 (TIMSS), that is 16 years later, the ratio had improved to 23% to 12% (c.f.), still being rather high. While repetition rates seem to decrease, being deferred to preparatory class only does for monolingual children with German as their family-language (Herzog-Punzenberger 2017a). In 2015/16, 62% of pupils in preparatory classes spoke another language than German at home while only 29% of pupils in Grade 1 did. An evidence-base speaking to the positive effects of this measure for multilingual pupils is lacking so far. Also in special school there is a puzzling overrepresentation of pupils with migration background. Compared to 2% of the native cohort, 3% of pupils speaking Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian at home and 5% of pupils with Turkish as family language attend special school in Austria. All these figures taken together point at a phenomenon called institutional discriminationFootnote 5 (Gomolla and Radtke 2009), especially for children from migrant groups dominated by a lower class background.

The relevance of specific institutional arrangements for explaining cross-national variations in educational outcomes by children of Turkish immigrants was at the heart of the TIES project (Crul et al. 2012). Findings show that the main components of the Austrian education system are the late starting age of pre-schooling, the early segregation into different ability tracks (at the age of ten), a low degree of permeability between education tracks after the early tracking, and a half-day teaching system in compulsory education. The impact of this institutional constellation on the early stages of a student’s educational career but also on its linguistic and cognitive development leads to a much greater importance of family resources (Schnell 2014). Children of less-educated parents are frequently streamed into less-academic tracks in lower-secondary education. This is particularly true for second-generation Turks who are more often tracked into the lower stream because they originate in higher numbers from less-educated families. Early selection determines to a large extent their subsequent educational pathways. The significance of within-family resources is also related to the half-day schooling system that persists throughout the compulsory education years. Although the high relevance of family support pertains to all students in the Austrian system, family support is of greater importance for second-generation Turks than for native students (Pásztor 2016; Schnell and Crul 2014; Schnell 2015). Overall, findings suggest that the combination of a number of important generic institutional arrangements of the education system seems to lead to greater levels of inequality for second-generation Turks in Austria because of greater interactions with individual and family level resources ─ as compared to the situation in other European countries such as France and Sweden.

To sum up, the educational structures tradition has so far mainly concentrated on the selectivity of the school system and its down-streaming logic in Austria. It is different from the political arithmetic tradition in so far as researchers do not simply describe over- and under-representation of pupils with migration backgrounds in different school types or outcomes, but try to establish causal relationships to features of the Austrian school system. Most of these studies use statistical analyses controlling for a large number of variables to draw conclusions. While causality is hard to establish, especially between macro-variables and micro-level outcomes, researchers in Austria have had strong hypotheses about the effects of structural features.

Intercultural Education and Discrimination Tradition

In this research tradition, we treat studies that analyze the implementation of intercultural learning (Binder 2004; Englisch-Stölner 2003; Luciak and Khan-Svik 2008; Schwab et al. 2013), teachers’ behavior and attitudes (Fillitz 2003), textbooks (Markom and Weinhäupl 2007) and complementary those studies which look at discrimination, prejudices and stereotype threat (Forghani-Arani et al. 2015). If reaching beyond quantitative descriptions, the theoretical foundation of most of this research lies in cultural anthropology and its critical understanding of culture as being embedded in power relations, schools as the major site of reproduction of the majority culture in modern nation-states, and ethnicity as being relational, processual, and at times instrumental and situational. If empirical, most of this research is qualitative, being sometimes supplemented with surveys of albeit small samples, only a few are based on quantitative analyses of larger samples. Generally, in this research tradition, class or socio-economic status tends to remain in the background even when some mention the unfavorable legal, economic, and housing situation of many families with migration backgrounds.

Instead of the anti-discrimination orientation found in England, the other and more positive side of intergroup relations, interculturality was to be developed as part of the curriculum and implemented in schools from 1993 onwards. Around this time, several articles were published discussing the benefits and limits of intercultural education. Notably, these were also published by representatives of the school administration (Pinterits 1990, 1991). This was not by accident nor long debated. The Ministry of Education’s sudden interest in proposals of how to react to multilingual classrooms was rather a consequence, as Jaksche (1998, pp. 42–45) shows, of the influx of migrants from East and Southeast Europe, and particularly the political problematization of it. While teachers’ earlier efforts to draw attention to the increase in linguistic and cultural diversity were marginalized, financial and legislative measures were taken in the aftermath of the fall of the iron curtain. Astonishingly enough, since the anti-foreigner campaign (Volksbegehren) of the FPÖ political party was not as successful as expected, the interest of academia in questions related to multicultural and multilingual classrooms decreased again.

Jaksche (1998) was the first to critically analyze the implementation of the ‘intercultural learning’ principle of instruction and concluded that teachers who had previous worked in the vein of intercultural learning were, through this principle, covered by law and all other teachers and principals were not obliged to do or change anything specific.

Binder (2004) compared the implementation of intercultural learning in the Netherlands and Austria and, surprisingly, came to the conclusion that the difference was merely on the level of rhetoric and not so much in practice. In both countries, clear guidelines and standard procedures as well as intensive factual knowledge transfer were missing. Consequently, shape and content were dependent on the personal engagement of the teachers. Binder (2003), Binder and Daryabegi (2003), Englisch-Stölner (2003), and Frank (2003), in their case-studies of lower secondary schools in Vienna and Lower Austria, also found that the implementation of ‘intercultural education’ is largely dependent on the personal interest of the teachers. Teachers and headmasters often simply ignored cultural and linguistic diversity and proceeded as though the pupils were a monolingual and monocultural group. Teachers complained about the lack of appropriate material, and textbooks being not adapted as well; however, as their training did not provide for a diverse classroom, many did not consider it their task to adapt to the circumstances. Parents often had very little contact with the school or the teachers and experienced language-based communication problems. This study was commissioned by the Ministry of Education and carried out with participatory observation, interviews with teachers and headmasters as well as questionnaires for pupils (n = 414) and parents (n = 324).

Ten years later, in 2009/10, a team of education researchers surveyed 68 primary schools in the federal state of Styria related to their “integration measures” concerning pupils with migration background (Schwab et al. 2013). They used 12 items covering intercultural learning, team teaching for integration, projects with intercultural content, events with intercultural content, intercultural teaching material, professionals for integration, translators for conversations with parents, cooperation with intercultural institutions, inclusion of pupils’ languages, inclusion of countries of origin, inclusion of pupils’ religion, inclusion of pupils’ habits and traditions. While most schools said they follow the principle of intercultural learning few carried out intercultural projects, events or cooperated with intercultural institutions. Although the legal regulations make clear that inclusion of the pupils’ languages, countries of origin and traditions should be part of intercultural learning, few followed these recommendations or were using intercultural teaching material. Only very few had translators for conversations with parents who had no good command of German. On top of this, there was a big difference between urban and rural schools with latter carrying out significant less activities in this domain. In both environments, the number of pupils with migration background was a strong predictor for the intensity of intercultural as well as language support activities. Pupils with a migration background attending schools with few migrant pupils were offered less favourable conditions lacking intercultural infrastructure, German as a second language support and mother tongue instruction for the most part.

Also in the studies of Furch (2009) with 315 primary school teachers and Weiss et al. (2007) with 1.400 primary and secondary school teachers the findings were similar. The majority of the respondents thought that teaching should be adapted to the needs of students with migration background but implementation was weak. In Furch’s study most teachers judged their knowledge on this subject to be sufficient while their actual knowledge turned out to range from insufficient to poor, even when, as 43% had done at some point in time, they had participated in intercultural training. Furch concluded that their self-image was distorted. At the time of the study, 79% had no experience with multilingual teaching material; this was interpreted as being rooted in the belief that pupils should learn German as fast as possible. These teachers mostly followed the public opinion that other languages distract children from learning German. More than half stated that migrant languages did not play a role during their classroom time and less than half were interested in learning a migrant language. ‘Interculturality’ was seen as a buzz-word which teachers mainly understood as differences between (regional) cultures. Surprisingly, even though the younger teachers had participated in intercultural training more often they were no more engaged in implementing intercultural learning than older teachers. The conclusion was that, despite the fact that more than half of the pupils in Viennese primary schools had a first language other than German, the primary school teachers were badly prepared for a diverse classroom with different languages, cultures, and religions at the beginning of the 2000s.

In the other study (Weiss et al. 2007) the sample included teachers from all over Austria and all school types, the only pre-selection requirement being a minimum of 10% of pupils with migration backgrounds in their school. While in primary school instruction in multicultural classroom were perceived as less problematic, in secondary schools problems increased due to ethnic tensions. However, more than a third reported knowing about specific bullying victims (39%) whereas 22% reported hostile group dynamics in their classrooms but not necessarily bound to ethnic background. Bullying was much more frequent in general secondary schools (56%) than in academic secondary schools where pupils with migration background are less frequent and the socio-economic composition more favourable. It co-occurred with a negative classroom climate. Teachers perceive religion, in this case ‘Islam’, as the biggest problem tied to multicultural classrooms. While few teachers report experiences with conservative Muslim families that prevent girls from participating in school activities, in the same way as others they perceive Islam as an impediment to gender equality.

In Austria there is no tradition of research on school books, thus there are also no quantitative studies on the effect of textbooks on pupils’ educational achievement. However, those researchers who analyze textbooks conceptualize effects as part of the secondary socialization process in which children develop their self-concept, especially concerning collective aspects.Footnote 6 This approach criticizes the values and knowledge presented in textbooks, which not only attach a higher status to Austrian middle-class culture, and more broadly to white or European expressions and manifestations, but also marginalize those of minorities or non-European provenance. This research mainly focuses on social aspects such as the ability to cooperate in diverse group settings and the ability to critically analyze diversity, hierarchy, and power relations. The link between the content of the textbooks and educational success has not been analyzed in Austria, as for example in studies on the ethnocentric curriculum in the US or the race and racial discrimination in school research tradition in England (Stevens 2007, pp. 157–161). Children are bound to accept, if there are no convincing ‘counter-offers’, the content of textbooks as authoritative knowledge about groups, group relations, ethnicity, and normality, and ultimately their collective identity (Hintermann 2007, 2010). In this way, textbooks contribute to pupils’ self-concepts and possibly to the stereotype threat effect in learning (Schofield 2005).

With Austria’s framework curriculum, textbooks sometimes are called ‘the hidden curriculum’ because teachers structure their teaching along the one book they are free to choose for each subject and year. However, the point of departure in this tradition is the critical analyses of implicit or even explicit views of school being the primary site of nation-state reproduction, i.e. one homogenous culture and one language superior to all others. Anthropologists have analyzed diverse school-books to uncover attitudes to specific issues such as Islam or general perspectives on ethnocentrism, anti-Semitism, sexism, and heteronormativity. Markom and Weinhäupl (2007) analyze textbooks from biology, history, and geography in lower secondary school (Grades 5–8). They conclude that racist and anti-Semitic accounts are rare, but that clichés and downgrading stereotypes are more frequent, especially regarding ‘the orient’, Islam, ‘the Third World’, Africa, ‘tribes’, homosexuality, and gender roles. The superficiality in avoiding stereotyping is best exemplified by the fact that even when the text is reasonably balanced the illustrations still convey stereotypes. While the textbooks treat the reality of power imbalance, hierarchy, and exploitation, racism and discrimination are barely mentioned and receive no detailed discussion. In a research project on migration(s) in textbooks which was carried out in cooperation with pupils and teachers Üllen and Markom (2016, also Hintermann et al. 2014) found that Austria’s history was still a field of exclusion and characterized by divided memories, different to – as advanced by Motte and Ohliger (2004) the Netherlands, the UK and France, were pupils with migrant backgrounds see their history as part of the national history.

Concerning discrimination and racism in educational settings very few scientific studies have been published so far. In 2016, a report on discrimination in education in Austria was published by a private initiative (IDB 2016) following a report on Viennese youth (Güngör and Nafs 2016) where school was the prime place of discrimination among those who reported being frequently discriminated against. In the IDB-report 47 cases were described, islamophobia appeared to be the strongest case, especially targeting girls wearing head-scarf. In the framework of a research project on the school reform project New Middle School teachers’ implicit biases, teacher expectations and the ethnic achievement gap was analyzed drawing on critical race theory (Forghani-Arani et al. 2015). With sixty teachers and 626 pupils in 11 schools the authors find that explicit judgements and expectations of teachers were not biased along migration variables whereas implicit associations were correlated with students’ achievements. Additionally, the authors tried to show the creative potential and options in students’ behavior towards being stereotyped even in pupil-teacher relationships.

Training in this area is still not compulsory in teacher education nor is research-based knowledge on prejudices and stereotype-threat among teacher trainers. More advanced concepts such as cultural awareness or intersectionality are barely known. In many instances, interculturality is merely a buzz-word equated with cultural differences and homogenizing concepts of cultural groups; very seldomly power-relations, the history and societal ramifications of migration such as the legal and economic regime are subject of teacher training. Some of the studies in the intercultural education and discrimination tradition are carried out with quantitative methodology, others apply document analyses and qualitative field studies or combine them in a mixed method approach. The lack of research studying interaction between the different groups of actors (teachers, pupils, parents) can partly be explained by a school-culture that is closed to the outside and policy-making that traditionally was not evidence-based. In sum, this tradition comprises studies on biases and discrimination in teacher-student relationship and teaching material as well as studies on intercultural learning in schools uncovering the lack of awareness, commitment and training in this field.

Multilinguality Tradition

In this research tradition, work is mainly undertaken by linguists but also by education researchers, sociologists, and political scientists. It is research on the multilinguality of schoolchildren, the school setting regarding multilinguality, the legal ramifications and implementation of the measures as well as teacher education and training for multilingual classrooms. Earlier studies focused on mother tongue teaching, either analyzing the organizational deficiencies in public schooling and its consequences (Cinar 1998) or looking at complementary organizational provisions in the private sector (Khan-Svik 2005), others focused on the support structures for learning German as a second language (Bauer and Kainz 2007). A few longitudinal studies were following the language development of schoolchildren over several years either based in pedagogical (cf. Khan-Svik 2007) or linguistic studies (Fischer 1992, 1995; Peltzer-Karpf et al. 2003; Brizic 2007). Since 2010, the focus is shifting stronger towards the teaching force, its competencies and practices (Vetter 2013), initial training and training institutions (Dannerer et al. 2013, Dirim 2015, Melter 2016). Publications on specific competencies such as teaching and learning reading have contributed to the academic discourse on multilinguality recently (Adaktylos and Purkharthofer 2011; Bleiker et al. 2016; Naphegyi 2016). Otherwise this research tradition is dominated by analyses of documents and discourses with a critical perspective towards power-structures (Busch and De Cillia 2003; Krumm and De Cillia 2008; De Cillia and Vetter 2013; Thoma and Knappik 2015) and explicitly interrelating theory on equity with multilingualism (Wegner and Dirim 2016).

As previously mentioned, the public discourse on pupils with migration backgrounds in Austria continues to be centered around German language proficiency.Footnote 7 In collaboration with researchers, the Ministry of Education developed a framework for the entire complex of cultural and linguistic diversity, migration and education, beyond the principles that were already established since the beginning of the 1990ies (see beginning of paragraph). Time after time recommendations have been drafted by researchers and practitioners who reached consensus on many points to reach equity and educational success by supporting language competences as for example in the “Grazer 3x10 Punkte-Programm zur Förderung von Sprachkompetenz, Chancengleichheit und Bildungserfolg” (e.g. Schmölzer-Eibinger 2010). Following the critical country study by the OECD (Nusche et al. 2009) that was in accordance with many of the Austrian experts in the field and the “Language Education Policy Profile” compiled by the Council of Europe and the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Science (BMUKK and BMWF 2007) before, teacher education and training was taken as a serious target in a strategy towards equity by the Ministry of Education during the 2010th years. The aim was that every subject-teacher should gain basic competences in language-sensitive teaching as most of the classrooms in Austria have become multilingual, with a national average of 25% and urban averages around 50% of pupils speaking a different language at home than the language of instruction (Bruneforth et al. 2015).

Parallel to this development a number of publications discussed general concepts of language awareness and multilinguality (Busch 2013; Wegner and Dirim 2016) and professionalization for linguistic diversity in teacher education (Vetter 2013). Provisions for continuing, cross-cutting multilingual language development during the educational career spanning from multilingual theater-work with pupils (Henning 2015), trilingual teaching material (Aistleitner et al. 2011) to language profiles of schools and whole-school development (Allgäuer-Hackl et al. 2015) were the topic of contributions to edited volumes or special issues of national journals (e.g. schulheft 1/2017, schulheft 3/2013, Erziehung und Unterricht 2016,9–10, 2011/1–2,) Oftentimes these publications are mixed concerning scientific research and practical examples as they try to get a wider readership and especially practitioners, i.e. teachers and other pedagogues.

In a postcolonial, deconstructivist view also teacher education institutions became subject of analyses, as re/production site of inequality through standardization processes and delegitimation of specific variations of languages, selection processes of (prospective) students and native speakerism (Thoma and Knappik 2015). In a secondary analysis of interviews with 35 teacher educators in seven universities Döll and Knappik (2015) tried to find out reasons for the underrepresentation of students with migration background in teacher education; the findings revealed frequent attributions of specific responsibilities and de-qualifications of teachers seen as migrant others. The results show that language ideologies, in particular the concept of ‘native speakerism’ serve to legitimize gatekeeping measures.

Education of Linguistic Minorities as a Political Issue

Since the 1980s, researchers focusing on linguistic minorities in Austria have been among the most active in contributing to scientific and public discourse on ethnicity and educational inequality while – not to give a wrong impression – the critical discourse as a whole was pretty marginalized. However, this kind of research and its institutional anchorage frequently came under threat (Fischer 1993, p. 13), especially during the 1980s and 1990s. As a consequence of political pressure against bilingualism in the southern region of Austria and an ever present devaluation of minority languages and individuals, such as Slovene in Carinthia, researchers investigated not only bilinguality and schooling as such, but also the whole complex situation of language intertwined with ethnicity, ethnic identity, belonging, attachment, and discrimination (DeCillia 1998; Boeckmann 1997; Busch 1991; Boeckmann et al. 1988). Baumgartner and Perchinig (1995) pointed out that differences between the regional contexts, albeit within the same nation-state, are deeply rooted in history. During the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, when Burgenland belonged to the Hungarian Transleithania and Carinthia to the Austrian Cisleithania, legal regulations and group relations were much more favorable in the Hungarian part compared to the German part. Even today, multilinguality is treated very differently in these two parts of Austria and is much less problematic in Burgenland than in Carinthia. However, numbers in bi- or trilingual programs (German & Slovene + Italian) are constantly rising and regional (trilingual) language portfolios have been developed (Pörtsch and Vrbinc 2013).

Language Development of Multilingual Children in Each of Their Languages

The most comprehensive in-depth study following the language development of 100 primary school children from Grade 1 to Grade 4 in Vienna was carried out by a team based in linguistic studies (Peltzer-Karpf et al. 2003). The study was commissioned by the Ministry of Education and included six classes with multilingual children from different backgrounds. To find out which factors enhance the proficiency in the language of instruction, they used a multi-methodological approach with linguistic tests (system linguistics, vocabulary, text comprehension, and text production) in the language of instruction, the first language of the children (if Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian or Turkish), and spontaneous conversation in any language combination the children wanted to use. Additionally, teachers and parents were surveyed so that the linguistic approach was accompanied by a sociolinguistic analysis. Results showed that language development in German happens differently among bilingual children than among monolingual children and that teachers have to be aware about the specificities to understand the structure of the particular mistakes etc. It does not help to support language learning in the language of instruction at the expense of the first language. As it turned out, those with the highest competence in their (non-German) first language when entering school reached the highest competence levels in (their second language) German after four years. The most important results for the development in the second language German were threefold. First, the children’s self-confidence and school-related experiences of success; fear and lack of self-confidence hampers language development. Second, a good competence in and a positive approach towards the first language were more important for gains in proficiency in German than the extent of motivation to learn German. Third, the societal status of their first language also has an effect on the children. Results that proved less important than expected were the percentage of multilingual children in the class and the age of first contact with German. Moreover, while the educational background of the parents, duration of stay, and orientation to stay or return were not as important as expected, poverty was (Fleck 2007).

Consequences of Language Oppression in the Country of Origin

A central question in this tradition was researched by Katharina Brizic during the 2000s and formalized in the language-capital model (2007). She tried to answer the question, why children of specific immigrant groups in different countries do have problems with language attainment while others don’t. To name the most prominent ones in Europe: Turks in Germany and Austria, Moroccans in the Netherlands, and Bengali in Great Britain show large differences in educational attainment compared to natives. As lower proficiency in the language of instruction is generally seen as the reason for significantly lower success in the educational system of the country of immigration, it is an important question to ask why this happens. One of the most innovative and widely recognized findings was that the language history of many families in these groups revealed specific patterns. When parents and grandparents were members of linguistic minorities which faced oppression in their country of origin, language transmission within the family was severely hampered. Therefore not only the development of the pupils’ second language, in Austria’s case German, was severely delayed or restricted, but also the development of the pupils’ first language or what was thought to be their first language. Often, the language the parents spoke with their children was not the parents’ first language because political pressure had forced a change in their family during their own childhood. For this reason, language attainment was a rather complicated process for the pupils, despite generally being highly motivated to learn German and be successful in school.

In sum, the multilinguality tradition consists of a normative and heuristic approach analyzing the societal context with its discourses and institutional structures on a macro level and an empirical approach on the micro and meso level. The latter focuses on the one hand on the development of multilinguality in Austrian schools either by concentrating on the development of the language proficiency in the pupils’ first and second language or by concentrating on the implementation of measures that should support the language development of the pupils. Some of the studies follow pupils over several years and other case studies concentrate on specific groups or schools. The implementation strand simply tries to document how variable, and at times limited, support measures for language development in schools are despite the fact that the legal framework offers many possibilities. During the second decade of the twenty-first century teachers’ competences and training have gained attention as well as the curriculum itself, especially in a cross-cutting manner, new approaches such as the multilingualism curriculum have been developed. However, empirical research in schools but also in teacher training institutions related to German as a second language is scarce in Austria. Given the high relevance in public discourse and politics it is astounding how little interest there is in adequate research by decision-makers.

Summary and Conclusion

Parallel to having gained considerable importance in public discourse, research on race/ethnicity and educational inequalities in Austria has intensified since the 2000s but is still marginal in institutionalized research. In the last 36 years it has developed along five research strands.

To begin with, the political arithmetic tradition consists of studies and reports that describe differences in the participation and outcomes of students from diverse ethnic backgrounds. Most researchers while coming from different disciplines agreed on discriminatory societal structures as the source for the enduring inequality in education. While researchers in the 1980s and 1990s had to rely on school statistics, census, and micro-census data, more nuanced analyses became possible with the data stemming from international comparative large-scale assessments that began with PISA 2000 and lately with national surveys on educational standards in mathematics, German and English. Until the 1990s, due to low naturalization rates, the children’s nationality was taken as the most important characteristic. Later on, during the 1990s when the share of naturalized pupils was growing, the Ministry of Education made statistics on children’s first languages available. Rising numbers were observed in most school types as well as enduring over-representation in lower tracks and among drop-outs and early school-leavers, higher repetition rates, and under-representation in academic tracks. Surprisingly, under-representation in apprenticeship positions and vocational training was documented since the 1980s but did not get much attention. Since 2000, with Austria’s participation in international tests, literacy results in reading, mathematics, and natural sciences were also compared and analyzed and showed large gaps for first- and second-generation students as did the national surveys since 2012. At the same time, the success of mono- or bilingual schooling in the autochthonous minority languages Slovene and Burgenland-Croatian was documented, resulting in higher shares of academic success and impressive intergenerational educational mobility.

The family background tradition (FB) emerged parallel to the political arithmetic tradition in Austria. It focused primarily on the significance of family background characteristics to explain ethnic disparities in education. This tradition has grown substantially over the last decade with the increasing availability of relevant quantitative survey data. Consequently, since 2000, studies in the FB tradition are variable driven and the more detailed the data, the greater the lack of clear theoretical foundations. This especially applies to the role played by social and cultural capital in exploring the complex relationship between social class origin, ethnicity, and educational achievement. Whereas the low educational success of children with migration background was explained heuristically with reference to the socio-economic position of the families and the discriminatory societal structures in the 1980s and 1990s, with LSA data a positivistic approach is rarely accompanied with reference to institutional structures or societal frameworks.

The third research tradition, called the structure of educational systems tradition, investigates the impact of the institutional arrangement of the Austrian educational system in producing educational inequality. It focuses primarily on the early age of selection and the down-streaming logic of the Austrian school system. This has been widely discussed since the 1970s regarding social class, but not with a main focus on children with migration background. Although many other institutional variables were discussed in this literature, including issues such as the lack of kindergarten places, late age of entrance into early childhood institutions, predominance of half-day schooling, frequency of grade retention, short duration of compulsory schooling resulting in early school-leavers without certificates, and the lack of communication with parents and ethnic communities, these have not been subject of closer investigation. With the availability of LSA datasets from 2000 onwards, researchers try to show effects of the age of first selection by using statistical analyses in country comparison. Nevertheless, the empirical evidence on the influences of institutional arrangements of the Austrian education system in producing ethnic educational inequalities has only increased during recent years, e.g. sophisticated analyses on segregation have entered the scene only in 2012 onwards.

The fourth research tradition, called the intercultural education and discrimination tradition, focuses on intercultural learning as a principle of instruction, its implementation, teachers’ education and training, actions and attitudes, exclusion and discrimination regarding textbooks. The most important results concern the minimalistic implementation of intercultural learning in schools, the lack of targeted training in teacher education and the incongruent self-image of the teachers regarding their knowledge and action of the issue. As most studies show, interculturality often functions as a catchword and works with a clear stress on cultural differences between ethnic groups lacking critical self-awareness and knowledge on social power-relations and societal ramifications of interactions. Teaching materials in Austria still lack important aspects of intercultural education. Whereas the other research traditions mentioned so far are strongly anchored in sociology with some researchers from political science and economics, this research tradition is predominantly rooted in cultural anthropology and pedagogy. Therefore, qualitative methodology, participant observation, document and discourse analyses are predominant.

The multilinguality tradition, the fifth tradition, focuses on the language development of bi- or multilingual schoolchildren, the nature and extent of support measures in German as a second language, mother-tongue teaching, the development of multilinguality in Austrian schools and teacher education as well as teacher education institutions as re/production site of inequality through native-speakerism, linguizism and selection mechanisms. This strand is quite heterogenous by either concentrating on the pupils, their development of multilingualism or proficiency in the first and second language or by concentrating on interventions, the teachers and the institutions, respectively. The former covers insights about micro-mechanisms of language transmission within families through in-depth case studies, for example explaining why specific groups appear to be particularly disadvantaged by reconstructing language biographies in families with the language policy in the country of origin being equally important as the one in the country of residence. In contrast, the implementation-oriented strand tries to document how variable, and at times limited, support measures for language development in schools are, despite the fact that the legal framework offers many possibilities. However, without transparent rules for each child’s support as well as adequate funding and employment of staff, especially mother tongue teachers, implementation simply does not work. The same is true for institutions of teacher education that are understood as the primary re/production of societal power-structures, hierarchies of languages, dialects, sociolects and countries.

Overall, our review indicated that the boundaries of these research traditions are not always clear cut. Most traditions interact with each other and in some cases the research could be classified in two or more traditions. Some traditions are particularly strong in a specific period closely tied to the availability of data, political developments, and public discourse. Since the 1980s, research on migration, minorities, and educational inequalities in Austria has been dominated by a strong tradition of analysis on the macro-level considering the consequences of societal structures and intergroup relationships for the individual and its attitudes and actions. During the first decade of the twenty-first century education researchers entered a new phase mainly through the availability and analysis of large-scale datasets. They produced a first wave of findings on the level of the individual and its family background with a view to international comparison. In the second decade, competences of teachers have attracted the interest of researchers, starting to look at their respective training. A future desideratum surely is an intensified look at teacher education and specifically teacher educators which can be seen as a main source of problems and solutions. As there is a lack of knowledge in the field of micro-mechanisms in teaching and learning, future research should explore how development in multilingual language and subject competences can be adequately supported. Empirical research on the level of schools and classrooms waits for attention since hardly any study covers these processes. Discrimination is still treated as taboo in research as it is in the Austrian discourse on teaching and school-culture generally. As was also shown statistically, a major problem is segregation along social status and migration background. Therefore, research should help to develop measures for desegregation and next to that, strategies for high quality in highly segregated schools, i.e. accompany interventions on different levels of the system. Implementation research is a field of research which is not developed and would deserve more attention.

The critical research existing has developed in a close collaborative relationship between sociologists, political scientists, sociolinguists, education researchers and oftentimes the Ministry of Education but also international bodies such as the Council of Europe, the European Union and the OECD. The majority of studies are produced in University context but contributions also emanate out of other public or non-governmental institutions. The common aim of these actors is the production of knowledge which should enable a shift in public discourse and policy that emphasises assimilation and monolingualism over multiculturalism and multi- or plurilingualism. At the same time the political landscape always was highly heterogenous not only concerning different political parties in coalition governments but also strands within parties so that contrary to the holistic approach of the Ministry of Education other actors in government passed a number of legal regulations that insinuated parents as the main source of problems, especially if they were migrants and did not speak German with their children.

Finally, even when politicians try to implement new approaches institutional change occurs slowly in a school-system with so many actors involved and, as has been shown at the beginning of the twentieth century, the innovative and inclusive direction might also be reversed. With a new government since the end of 2017 following a more segregative ideological agenda, concrete measures in the education and research sector have to be awaited and critically observed.