The increase since the nineties is huge: The number of private schools in Germany has increased from 1992 to 2017 by 81 percent, the Federal Statistical Office said on Tuesday.
Accordingly, every eleventh student now visits a private school. 25 years ago, it was 4.8 percent. The share of private schools in general education schools has increased in the period from 4.5 percent to 11 percent.
In recent years, however, growth has slowed down somewhat. Compared to the previous year, the numbers increased only by 0.1 percentage points in the proportion of students and 0.2 percentage points in the share of schools.
In the individual federal states, there were marked differences in the proportion of private pupils. The range ranged from 4.3 percent in Schleswig-Holstein to 14.4 percent in Saxony.
Expectations of the parents
Educational researchers are still searching for the causes of the increase. Parents associate certain expectations with private schools, says Christa Katharina Spieß from the German Institute for Economic Research in Berlin (DIW). Whether these are also fulfilled, there are so far no long-term representative studies.
The Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung recently commissioned a study comparing the cognitive performance of students in private and public schools. It turned out that students with a comparable social background achieve similarly good results. Private schools are not better than public ones per se.
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However, students on private schools generally perform better. This is due to the composition of the student body: The proportion of children from educational families is higher in private schools than in public schools - and these groups are generally more efficient.
It remains unclear whether the students in the long term do not have other benefits or disadvantages, such as at work or in the wage development. Here it still lacks the appropriate research.
On the other hand, it is clear that private schools are exacerbating the problem of social division. On the basis of the socio-economic panel, DIW scientist Spieß and two colleagues examined last year from which parents the private pupils mainly come from.
Many private students from academic households
Thus, the education of parents plays an increasingly important role in private school use in both western and eastern German states. In East Germany, more than 23 percent of all students from private-sector academies go to a private school, in West Germany it is just under 17 percent.
Private students are also financially better off. The spit study shows that they live significantly more often in high-income households than students in public schools. In East Germany, the difference is therefore particularly large: Only five percent of the families of private students are dependent on state support as Hartz IV. For the students in public schools it is 20 percent.
From these data, however, it can not be concluded that these parents generally want to distinguish their children through their private school attendance. Because in rural areas of eastern Germany there is a supply shortage. According to Spieß, the private schools partly compensated for the problem that public schools were too far away from their place of residence.
The educational researcher also puts it into perspective: "There are many other sites of segregation." After all, almost 90 percent of the students still go to public schools. To address the problem of social division also included other issues in the field of education. For this reason Pike researches not only private schools, but also nursery schools or the question of who takes private tuition.