Education Policies in Germany and the Netherlands: Colour-blind or Colour-conscious?

With a growing recognition for the diversity among people with a migration background, the process of defining who precisely is subject to immigrant integration policy and which categories are used to identify this group, is increasingly put into question. In particular, scholars point at how racial and ethnic categories, when used in policymaking, can reify racial or ethnic identities and in that way reinforce or even create group inequalities (e.g. Mügge & van der Haar, 2016). In this paper, it is explored how racial and ethnic categories are used in the general policy area of education to govern migration related diversity in Germany and the Netherlands. How policymakers deal with migrant populations in general policy fields (as opposed to the field of integration in a narrow sense) becomes especially important in light of the growing second and third generations of people with a migration background, who are no longer a legitimate subject of immigrant integration policies as applicable to newcomers. More specifically, the paper concentrates on the distinction between ‘colour-blind’ policy frames, which reject racial and ethnic categories, and ‘colour-conscious’ policy frames, which accept these categories (Bleich, 2003). By making use of critical frame analysis (Verloo, 2005), it shows how these two frames are reflected in German and Dutch education policies. While the colour-blind policy frame prevails in both countries on the discursive level, on the level of adopted policy measures this trend towards colour-blindness seems to be more clear-cut in the Netherlands. Finally, based on a qualitative content analysis of semi-structured interviews and through the comparison between the two cases, the paper also aims to provide explanations for the relative presence of colour-conscious and colour-blind policy measures in education policy. Thereby the paper not only sheds light on the way in which categories shape policy measures in a crucial policy area for integration, but also demonstrates how changes in the use of these categories can be explained.