Providing education for all has been a core objective of many governments since the launch of the Millennium Development Goals a decade ago. Improving educational attainment alone is not enough, however. The quality of the education provided by the system is a necessary component to achieve long-term gains in economic growth. Therefore, equipping children with the high quality knowledge and skills needed for today's labor market should be the priority.
Basic education is the foundation of education and learning and, as such, is the point where Turkey started its push for education for all. As a result, Turkey has made remarkable progress on access to basic education and now has almost universal primary school enrollment - a 98.4 percent net enrollment rate as of 2010/11. The gap in access across regions has also narrowed significantly over time, although enrollment continues to vary significantly across regions.
Educational attainment alone is not enough however: it must be coupled with quality. The quality of the education provided by the system is what really matters to achieve long-term gains in economic growth (Hanushek & Wößmann 2007a, 2007b, 2010). Therefore, equipping children with the high quality knowledge and skills needed for today’s labor market is a priority. Attending school will have a substantial impact only if students effectively learn the cognitive and non-cognitive skills needed to access the labor market.
Early childhood education (ECE) is an intervention for the physical and intellectual growth of children in their early years of life, which is embedded within the broader notion of early childhood development (ECD) policies. Evidence from international research has shown that ECD interventions are probably one of the best instruments for breaking the intergenerational transmission of poverty and inequality, especially for low-income countries.
Teachers are the single most important school variable influencing student achievement. Having effective teachers can substantially close the achievement gap between low-income and high-income students, and low-performing students benefit more from more effective teachers. Rockoff, who followed the same group of teachers over a 10-year period, estimated that differences in the quality of teachers explain up to 23 percent of the variation in student performance. In a review of more than 500,000 studies on factors affecting student performance, Hattie reaches a similar conclusion: teachers are the most important factor in control of the school system and account for about 25 percent of the variance in student achievement.
Education is one of the most profitable investments from both an individual and a societal point of view. For an individual, the economic benefits of education come from increased earnings with each new level of education attained and lower rates of unemployment. For a society, the higher the education of its population usually results in a larger collection of tax receipts, as well as improved health and political stability, among others. Financing public education, however, is a tricky area since a lot of questions need to be answered and a series of trade-offs need to be resolved.
Information is a key crosscutting tool to affect the three broad areas that are critical to support high-quality student outcomes: inputs and processes, incentives, and accountability. High quality information can help to improve the quality of inputs and processes. Good data is also needed to design and implement effective incentives, monetary as well as non-monetary, to encourage better teaching and learning. And last, but not least, information can support increased accountability for improved outcomes by giving voice to students, parents, teachers, school leaders, and communities at the local level as well as policy makers and the public at the national level.
Although Turkey has significantly expanded access to basic education in the last decade, important challenges await on two interrelated fronts: quality and equity. Turkey’s educational system is currently of low quality relative to the growth and competitiveness ambitions of the country and is also significantly more inequitable than most other OECD countries.
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