Summary This article presents and interprets data which was obtained over the course of an empirical investigation of regional school development between the years 2000 and 2004. The project was triggered by the recent trend in the education policy of Northrhine-Westfalia of transferring the responsibility for school development successively away from the state-level administration and towards local administration as well as individual schools, and of encouraging differentiation and cooperation between schools in an attempt to promote the creation of new „Bildungslandschaften" (school environments). The purpose of the project was to falsify the implicit assumptions underlying this political strategy, and to scrutinise its likely consequences. Three tables, providing a systematic overview of data about the "dimensions of internationality of (secondary) schools", form the core of the article. Its first section shows - with reference to the tables - by way of example that (1) a school's profile and opportunities for cooperation arise chiefly from its ties with social networks and that (2), in the light of this, processes of internationalisation have become one of the most crucial factors in the hierarchy formation amongst schools in local communities. The second section of the article places these empirical findings in their political and historical context: it explains that (3) internationalisation has never been an uni-directional process but has always had two distinct faces, and that (4) the recent political drive towards decentralisation of the task of school development is bound to reinforce the socially selective impact of internationalisation.
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↑ https://www.vr-elibrary.de/doi/pdf/10.7788/bue.2006.59.3.251?download=true