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National law and policies on fee or for free – Turkey

It matters if the state provides education for free or charges fees. Every state in the world has signed up to at least one international treaty obliging it to making primary education free and compulsory, and secondary education progressively so. But education cannot be compulsory if it is not also free and this contradiction is too often ignored. Furthermore, what does free actually mean in a world with numerous overt and hidden costs, to learners, parents, local communities? In a 2006 survey by Katarina Tomasevski education was found not to be genuinely free in the vast majority of countries in the world. The quote below on your country (if information was available) is from this very important survey.

 

The national laws and policies are the applications of the constitution, yet may actually be more advanced than this, as they are generally redrawn or updated more frequently than constitutions are. Laws are made by the government, the parliamentarians, and the bureaucrats, often in consultation with civil society. However, this also leaves them open to vulnerability and retrogression as they can become instruments of short-term politics and priorities. Laws and policies are open to change and influence through the routes of the democratic process and civil society campaigns. And where possible their violations should be challenged, either through the courts or through judicial review.

 

The state is the central actor in any claim to the right to education: it is the prime duty-bearer and the prime implementer; it is the guarantor; and it is the state´s signature vis-à-vis the international norms and standards which binds it to respect, protect and fulfil the right to education. The state must therefore be judged or challenged on its central text on the right to education, whether this be the constitution, the laws or the policies.

Turkey is in many ways a bridge between Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Its pending application for membership in the European Union leaves a decision whether it will ultimately classified as a European or an Asian country for the future. The opening sentence of Turkey’s initial report under the Convention on the Rights of the Child has emphasized that Turkey is “a European, Balkan, Caucasian, Middle Eastern, Mediterranean and Black Sea State all at once”. This pivotal geographical position has contributed to the diversity of Turkey’s population. It was perhaps to counter this diversity that a unitary, centralized, secular state structure was established and a homogenous citizenry envisaged. Much as everywhere else, education was seen as the key for creating such a homogeneous citizenry. Thus, minority rights remain a contentious issue and a very recognition by the government that minorities exist, the Kurds in particular, and that they should be entitled to minority rights creates endless controversies.

 

In 2004, for the first time in Turkey, governmental budgetary allocations to education exceeded its military expenditure. Military expenditure had proverbially taken precedence over all other budgetary items and it was for a long time exempt from public scrutiny.

 

The shift from prioritizing investment in education over military expenditure in 2004 was, thus, a newsworthy item. The need to review and curtail military expenditure because of its high opportunity cost for development was prioritized in the mid-1990s by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Their pledge fell into oblivion although the human rights impact of the influence of the armed forces in Turkey’s education is considerable, albeit also exempt from public scrutiny. Turkey’s many reforms aimed at meeting the European Union’s conditions for a beginning of the negotiations leading towards membership in the EU have had beneficial effects in terms of reducing military expenditure as well as making it gradually less un-transparent than it had used to be.

 

In its reports under human rights treaties, the government claims that primary education is free and has done so for a long time. Other governmental reports contradict that assertion. In a report to the Council of Europe, the government has acknowledged that “some school equipment and materials are paid for by parent-teacher associations” while the full costs of school meals and transportation have to be paid by the parents. It has added that formally “schools are prohibited from receiving funds directly from parents,” but this can be done “on an informal basis”.

 

The reason for levying formal and informal charges in education was its expansion without a corresponding increase in the budgetary allocations. They actually decreased in the 1990s  although the number of children at school increased almost by half, from 11 to 15 million.  Turkey’s population is young, almost one third are school-going children, and this necessitates a huge increase in budgetary allocations to education. The European Union has prioritized it within the conditions for Turkey’s commencement of negotiations for an eventual membership in the EU.Also, in its first National Programme for the Adoption of the Acquis comunaitaire (NPAA), Turkey committed itself to increase the length of compulsory education to 12 years by 2005. This was not accomplished. An important reason is that free education has not yet been guaranteed even for the first eight years of schooling.

 

Comparative studies of educational accomplishments in the OECD countries routinely locate Turkey at the bottom, regardless of the yardstick used, and this underlines the priority for a comprehensive education strategy and for elevating the priority of education in budgetary allocations. Accurate statistics on the numbers of children who should be at school are the first step towards such a strategy. There is, however, an abyss between the officially reported statistics and the findings of international agencies on the numbers of out-of-school children.

 

The Education for All (EFA) 2000 Assessment reported the enrolments in primary school at 87.5% but, as a consequence of the prolongation of compulsory education to eight years in 1997, enrolments decreased. The Ministry of Education subsequently reported an enrollment ratio of 97.6 per cent in primary education, but the EFA 2006 Report lowered that to 86%.

 

Moreover, the government has acknowledged that there are “children who do not have an identity card and those who are not registered on the civil registries”. There is no authoritative information on the numbers of children who cannot claim their rights because they do not exist due to the lack of identity documents. The Common Country Assessment (CCA) by the United Nations agencies in Turkey has singled out the gaps in official statistics:

 

Turkey lacks reliable information on a number of areas. To begin with, due to the current state of the birth registration system, the annual number of births is not known. There is no recording system for disabled children.

 

The UNESCO/UNICEF’s research into the number of out-of-school children has found that one-third of the region’s out-of-school children are in Turkey. This demonstrates that Turkey remains far from ensuring primary education for all.