When Sabine Schwarz* first heard about German Education Minister Karin Prien's idea via a friend, she thought it was just a bad joke. A quota limiting the number of immigrants at German schools was a "conceivable model," the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) politician had suggested, adding that Germany should check what other countries do to determine "whether that ends up being 30 or 40%".

Schwarz is the head of an elementary school in Germany's most populous state of North Rhine-Westphalia. More than 80% of her 350 pupils are from immigrant families. She says Prien's proposal would be impossible to implement in reality: "We don't even have the quota of people here who would qualify as German-speaking or German," Schwarz told DW.

The Germans who live in the detached houses next to the school prefer to send their children elsewhere, says Schwarz. She finds this sad.

Almost 20 years ago, North Rhine-Westphalia abolished the obligation to send one's child to a primary school in the neighborhood. As a result, many parents avoid schools like Schwarz's — for fear that learning among a high proportion of immigrants could have a negative impact on their own children's academic success.

"What you always hear is that migration is equated with a lower level of education and that the children learn more slowly. But that's not true at all," Schwarz says. "For example, we benefited from the wave of refugees in 2015 because we received many children who were very interested in getting a good education."

Schwarz criticizes the fact that all children are lumped together. There are "traumatized children with refugee experience who can't even think about education at first, and children who are very........

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