"We have more immigrants, so we do worse internationally than Finland or Korea", says Josef Kraus, President of the German Teachers Association, about the new PISA study. But it doesn't have to stay that way. 

In the latest PISA study, Germany has improved a bit. In international comparisons, however, its pupils are still far from the top. There are many reasons for this. But according to Josef Kraus, President of the German Teachers Association, the "high proportion of immigrants in Germany's schools".

Based on information from the Federal Statistics Office, the proportion of foreign children in Germant schools in 2012 was on average 7.7 per cent - significantly higher in urban areas. "Finland has two per cent immigrants on average," says Josef Kraus. Studies show that immigrants do significantly worse than children from a non-immigrant background. "That explains why we're not at the level of Finland or Korea," Kraus states to FOCUS Online. 

Children from EU countries have no performance problems or even children from East Asia, for example Vietnam, according to Kraus. "Only Italian children are significantly worse than all other pupils with an EU background," he says. "The biggest problems, however, are with children from Turkey, the Arab lands and the former Yugoslavia."

For that reason, urban areas, in particular, with a high proportion of foreigners, like Berlin, North-Rhine Westphalia or also the city states Hamburg and Bremen do significantly worse than Bavaria or Thuringia. And these areas then drag Germany down in international comparisons.