Social justice in Turkish education system: Issues and interventions

Abstract

This chapter discusses the research and practice in social justice in education in Turkey. Economic, social, political, and demographic developments that create and perpetuate disparities in different societies are equally valid for Turkey. In order to capture the state of social justice in education first, Turkey’s social, demographic, and economic status of the country was discussed. Turkey has a relatively young population, which increases the demand for public education. The key figures on the schooling rates in Turkey suggest that Turkey has been improving its performance in providing access to school to its young population. However, economic performance of the country suggest that significant part of population suffers from inequality in income distribution. Social, economic, and demographic issues as well as the key issues in the structure of education system in Turkey give way to quality of education issue in Turkey. Particularly economic disparities contribute largely to social justice issues in education. The issues caused by the economic structures are perpetuated by the centralized education system. It is argued that the centralized education of Turkey and functionalist sociology exist in a symbiosis, which leads to several false assumptions about developing and delivering educational services in the country. Assuming that the central authority is able to neutralize the differences across the schools so that the students attending any school in the system have access to the elements of education of the same quality level; assuming that the students attending any school have the same capacity to benefit from educational provisions; and assuming that school improvement models can be applied in the same way to every school setting largely lead to ignoring the social, political, and economic disparities eliminating the students’ access to quality educational provisions. The equal approach deepens the deprived status of the disadvantaged students. The dilemma of granting access but failing to provide quality is related to the concepts of horizontal-vertical inequalities. On the other hand, scholarly work on social justice in education can be grouped under macro- and micro-sociological perspectives. Research on micro-sociological perspective in Turkey largely focus on the role of principal in mitigating the effect of disparities on educational attainment of the students, while research stream on macro-sociological perspective focuses largely on impact of certain setups on students’ schooling. However, research in both of these streams highlights four important gaps in social justice in education of Turkey. First, research gap suggests that scholarly work on social justice in Turkey rely extensively onWestern concepts and terminology. The policy gap suggests that Turkey lacks a broad social justice in educational policy, which accounts on every institution in the country. The leadership gap suggests that school principals and teachers do not have a formal role definition for social justice leadership. Rather, social justice behaviors of school leaders are motivated by personal, altruistic, or moral endeavor of the principals. Finally, the institution gap suggest that the centralized education system’s hidden assumptions form obstacles for true social justice practices in education.