Sociolinguistics Symposium 19
Freie Universität Berlin | August 21-24, 2012
Programme: accepted abstracts
Abstract ID: 330
Part of Session 130: Language in Multilingual Cities (Other abstracts in this session)
"Goetsch in die Primatenschule!" Race, Class and Language in School Reform in Hamburg
Authors: Bale, Jeff
Submitted by: Bale, Jeff (Michigan State University, United States of America)
“Send Goetsch to primate school!” So read the slogan on a sign – held by a 6-year-old child – at a fall 2009 protest against a planned school reform measure in Hamburg. At the center of the reform was restructuring the Hamburg school system: Grades 0-6 in the newly named Primarschule (“primary school” – hence the troublesome play on words in the slogan cited above) and two secondary tracks instead of three.
The measure was proposed by Christa Goetsch, a Green Party politician and until 2010 Hamburg’s education minister. In justifying the planned reform, policy makers toggled between two rationales of preparing Hamburg’s youth for a globalized economy and social justice for immigrant students. The protest against the measure was organized by Wir Wollen Lernen ("We Want to Learn"), a citizens’ network formed in 2008 to oppose the measure. The group successfully led a ballot initiative that blocked the main provisions of the reform, which ultimately contributed to dissolution of Hamburg’s government and new elections in early 2011.
That policy actors invoked the needs and/or perceived problems of German language learners in framing this reform is not merely rhetorical: well over 30% of incoming 1st-graders are dominant in a non-German language; German language learners repeat a grade at disproportionately high rates; they are grouped at disproportionately high rates in vocational and basic secondary institutions; and they leave school without qualifications at disproportionately high rates.[1]
I frame my analysis of this contested policy reform with Jane Hill’s notion of language panics. For Hill, language panics emerge from social conflicts that present as questions of language use in society. However, they tend to employ a highly racialized discourse that targets minoritized communities as specific threats to members of a dominant class, cultural and linguistic identity. That a 6-year-old child was given a protest sign advocating that Goetsch be sent to the “primate school” is one indication of how this panic manifested.
In addition to media images and texts, this interpretive policy analysis draws on the following sources: official education ministry policy documents, documents and communications from the anti-reform coalition, and (pending grant funding) interviews with policy-relevant actors.
This paper focuses on two findings from the analysis described above. First, although official policy actors framed the reform in public and to the media as aiding German language learners, official policy texts themselves were silent on this rationale. Instead, official texts foregrounded Hamburg’s need to compete in a globalized economy and the role of schooling in that competition. This gap between political rhetoric and official policy aims left immigrant voices out of the policy process, and allowed opposition voices to insist – with some credibility – that their rejection of the reform was not based on race or anti-immigrant sentiment.
Second, while the opposition coalition repeatedly asserted their status as ordinary concerned citizens of Hamburg, a closer read of their advocacy against this measure indicates that theirs was a perspective of a local economic elite trying to maintain a school structure that benefits their own elite status.