Danish school wants to prevent white flight with ethnic quotas

As the number of non-European immigrants all over Europe increases, difficulties arise especially at school level where children of different backgrounds have to mix. Last month an intense debate raged around a Danish school outside Aarhus where incoming students in their first year were divided into classes according to their ethnicity. Three classes out of seven had a limit of 50 percent non-Danish students, while the rest were composed of immigrant children.

The headmaster of Langkær upper secondary school, Yago Bundgaard, justified these quotas on the basis that it would prevent so-called white flight from the school, allowing children to integrate.

“For real integration to take place in a class there has to be sufficient numbers from both groups for it to happen,” he told public broadcaster DR.

Danish parents had been withdrawing their children from the school from 2007 onwards. In that year, there were only 25 percent non-Danish children in the school, a figure which has now risen to 80 percent. During his radio interview, Bundgaard described the quotas as “the least bad solution”, indicating that students had been divided into the classes on whether they had “a Danish-sounding name”, but had to admit that such a characterisation was “fluid”.

A Turkish-born activist in Denmark, Özlem Cekic, reacted by saying she would lay a charge against the school with the country’s Board of Equal Treatment (Ligebehandlingsnævnet).

“When a headmaster isolates the brown children from the white in an upper secondary school, he is part of sending a signal that the whites must be protected from the brown,” she wrote on her Facebook.

A human rights lawyer, Nanna Krusaa, said during a TV 2 programme that “placing students solely based on race or ethnicity is in my clear view illegal”.

Reacting to the controversy, the Danish minister of education, Ellen Trane Nørby asked the school for a report to ascertain whether any laws had been broken. She also said that she intended to introduce legislation to ensure that secondary schools in Denmark became more ethnically mixed.

She wrote on her Facebook page: “The fundamental problem is that we in Denmark have… schools with a too high ratio of students with a different ethnic background than Danish.”