Date

2020-01-01

Author

Kondakçı, Yaşar

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This chapter discusses the research and practice in social justice in education inTurkey. Economic, social, political, and demographic developments that createand 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 arelatively young population, which increases the demand for public education.The key figures on the schooling rates in Turkey suggest that Turkey has beenimproving its performance in providing access to school to its young population.However, economic performance of the country suggest that significant part ofpopulation suffers from inequality in income distribution. Social, economic, anddemographic issues as well as the key issues in the structure of education systemin Turkey give way to quality of education issue in Turkey. Particularly economic disparities contribute largely to social justice issues in education. The issues causedby the economic structures are perpetuated by the centralized education system. It isargued that the centralized education of Turkey and functionalist sociology exist ina symbiosis, which leads to several false assumptions about developing anddelivering educational services in the country. Assuming that the central authorityis able to neutralize the differences across the schools so that the students attendingany school in the system have access to the elements of education of the samequality level; assuming that the students attending any school have the samecapacity to benefit from educational provisions; and assuming that school improvementmodels can be applied in the same way to every school setting largely lead toignoring the social, political, and economic disparities eliminating the students’access to quality educational provisions. The equal approach deepens the deprivedstatus of the disadvantaged students. The dilemma of granting access but failing toprovide quality is related to the concepts of horizontal-vertical inequalities. On theother hand, scholarly work on social justice in education can be grouped undermacro- and micro-sociological perspectives. Research on micro-sociological perspectivein Turkey largely focus on the role of principal in mitigating the effect ofdisparities on educational attainment of the students, while research stream onmacro-sociological perspective focuses largely on impact of certain setups onstudents’ schooling. However, research in both of these streams highlights fourimportant gaps in social justice in education of Turkey. First, research gap suggeststhat scholarly work on social justice in Turkey rely extensively onWestern conceptsand terminology. The policy gap suggests that Turkey lacks a broad social justice ineducational policy, which accounts on every institution in the country. The leadershipgap suggests that school principals and teachers do not have a formal roledefinition for social justice leadership. Rather, social justice behaviors of schoolleaders are motivated by personal, altruistic, or moral endeavor of the principals.Finally, the institution gap suggest that the centralized education system’s hiddenassumptions form obstacles for true social justice practices in education.

URI

https://link.springer.com/referencework/10.1007%2F978-3-319-74078-2
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/93441

Collections

Department of Educational Sciences, Book / Book chapter