Many roads lead to Rome—and one of them is the Scuola Democratica Conference, which took place this year for the first time at Sapienza University in Rome. The conference theme, “Learning for Democracy—Democracy for Learning,” was addressed in many presentations and sparked exciting discussions. Together with a team from the department headed by Prof. Dr. Nina Bremm at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, we were able to present initial findings from the legal and administrative analysis of our accompanying research on the “Startchancen” program. This focused on the selection criteria for participating elementary schools and the question: Which schools are made visible by a political policy instrument, and which schools remain unseen? A second presentation, part of Lea Mahfoudh’s doctoral dissertation, addressed school choice in Hamburg. The administrative guidelines governing the right to free school choice were discussed in the context of the socio-spatial structure of a district in western Hamburg, raising the question of whether one can truly speak of free school choice.
