With anti-Muslim and anti-Turkish sentiment on the rise in Germany, a study by the German University of Mannheim illustrated how Turkish students are being discriminated against by their prospective teachers.
For the study released on Monday, 204 people studying teaching were asked to grade two identical exam papers, penned by an eighth-grader. The difference was the name of the student on the paper. The teaching students invariably assigned poorer marks to the paper of "Murat" (a common Turkish name) while "Max" had higher marks.
Meike Bonefeld, co-author of the survey, told Germany's Spiegel that the results surprised them and would provide a new perspective for the training of teachers to be more objective. The survey's authors also note that more than 80 percent of participants can correctly identify the child's name to his migrant background.
German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas has acknowledged that Turks in Germany still faced hostility and discrimination while speaking on the 25th anniversary in May of a neo-Nazi arson attack that killed five Turks.
The three million Turks in Germany largely descended from the country's "guest workers" who arrived to aid the post-World War II development boom, often complain of the racist attacks and discrimination.
A 2017 study revealed that Turks responding to housing ads have a higher rejection rate than those with German or other foreign names. Similarly, a study by the University of Koblenz shows that Turkish internship applicants in Germany are far less likely than others to be offered a job.
