Concluding remarks and policy implications

Since the mid-1990s, public education provision in Turkey has been in constant transformation, parallel to modernization efforts that have been closely linked to the political determination of governments to complete Turkey’s accession to the European Union. During this period two nation-wide interventions stand out due to their dramatic impact on children, students, teachers and the education system as a whole. First, the Compulsory Education Law enacted in 1997 required that all the children enrolled in grade 4 or lower must stay in school until the completion of the eighth grade. Second, the introduction of tests to be taken by teachers in order to be

evaluated for employment (the KPSS) in 2002 changed the teacher selection regime

fundamentally. With this new regulation, the MONE abandoned recruiting teachers based on lottery and started to use an objective measure, i.e. test scores of teachers. This dissertation provides an econometric evaluation of the impacts of these interventions on different aspects of human development.

In Chapter 3, the dissertation establishes a causal link between the enactment of KPSS and student achievement and presents evidence indicating that teacher recruitment via the more meritocratic and objective assessment instead of the lottery may have had a positive impact on student achievement. It is also shown that the increase in the average student achievement in Turkey as measured in international assessments such as PISA and TIMSS may be partially explained by the inception of tests concerning the assignments of public servant candidates. These findings are consistently obtained under various model specifications and sub-sample analyses.

The findings presented in Chapter 3 have direct policy implications for Turkey. Given the excess supply of teacher candidates, the centralized testing system implemented in 2002 may have been a useful tool to distinguish effective and ineffective candidates. The evidence thus suggests that the current teacher selection model should be preserved. However, there are also several

shortcomings of this teacher selection regime. First, centralized test does not vary by subject. This means that teacher candidates for all subjects are selected by answering the same set of questions. Thus the examination is not capable of distinguishing different qualities necessary to be an effective mathematics, science or art teacher. It only provides a generic measure of the knowledge on general culture and educational sciences of teacher candidates. Subject-matter knowledge and knowledge on subject-matter teaching are not measured with the examination. On the other hand the relevant literature provides ample evidence of a positive relationship between subject-matter knowledge and teacher effectiveness (Darling-Hammond, 2000; Metzler & Woessmann, 2012).

In 2007, the MONE attempted to address this problem by introducing a second stage of

centralized testing. The proposed second stage was specifically designed for the measurement of subject-matter knowledge and knowledge on subject-matter teaching. Thus the tests of the

second stage were also planned to be specific to each subject. Then, it was proposed that the final score was to be computed as a weighted sum of test scores obtained in the first and second stage. However, teacher unions resisted the introduction of another stage of examinations and applied to Council of State for the cancellation of the proposed bylaw. The Council of State cancelled the bylaw. Nevertheless the need for an additional stage of testing for the measurement of subject- matter knowledge and knowledge on teaching subject-matter is still a significant part of

such a testing mechanism and this will likely lead to another round of legal battles between the MONE and teacher unions.

Another critical issue with the teacher testing regime is that currently teacher testing is tightly connected to an excess supply of teacher candidates. However, maintaining a large body of unemployed teacher candidates is unlikely to be politically sustainable and the chronic excess supply of teachers is likely to harm the teaching profession and this may lead to an overall decrease in teacher quality over the long term. Currently, the MONE and Council of Higher Education are trying to solve this problem by shutting down evening education pre-service teacher training and pedagogic formation programs (master level programs which grants teacher certification upon successful completion without a four-year degree from education faculties). Additionally the MONE and Council of Higher Education are also considering reducing the quotas of education faculties. Obviously these initiatives may cause a significant reduction in the size of the pool of teacher candidates and this reduction in the pool of potential teachers, in turn, may cause a decrease in the overall teacher quality. Therefore, another policy option may be to change the timing of selection. In addition to reducing the quotas of educational faculties, student selection procedures to education faculties may be strengthened and the course of selection may go on within the four-year training in education faculties. Students not suitable for teaching profession may be directed to other programs during their university education. Such a

comprehensive selection mechanism may be better in identifying effective teachers as well as it may shrink the excess teacher supply. Indeed this is exactly how teachers are selected in

Singapore and Finland, among the top performing school systems of the world (Barber & Moursched, 2007).

In Chapter 4, the dissertation established a causal link between the enactment of the 1997

Compulsory Education Law and years of schooling and the probability of completing eight years of schooling of women. The findings also indicate that the Compulsory Education Law increased high school completion, i.e. eleven years of schooling. The econometric analysis is robust to the inclusion of additional control variables and the instrumental variable passes the tests of weak identification.

The findings exhibited in Chapter 4 also have direct policy implications. First, extending compulsory education and supporting this legal change with necessary resources and political commitment may have an impact on completed years of schooling. This is an important inference because implementing compulsory schooling laws and ensuring compliance to

compulsory schooling laws in developing countries are indeed very challenging. Krueger (1996), analyzing school leaving age for birth cohorts between 1959 and 1974, concludes that 80 percent of children in Brazil, 40 percent of children in India and 25 percent of children in Mexico and Portugal left school before reaching the minimum schooling age. Weiner (1991) claims that the lack of national commitment regarding the implementation of compulsory schooling law in India is one of the major factors related with the low compliance rates. Within this context, the

implementation of --and compliance with-- the Compulsory Education Law in Turkey stands out as a policy intervention which can be considered as successful. Even for the first three cohorts that were subjected to the Compulsory Education Law, the rate of completing eight years of schooling was above 70 percent. It also has to be underlined that the compliance rate exceeded 90 percent in early 2000s and reached almost 100 percent during mid-2000s.

This achievement may be partially explained by the strong and consistent political commitment behind the implementation of the Compulsory Education Law and its egalitarian goals. As

discussed in detail in previous chapters, total annual public resources devoted to the

implementation were around USD 3 billion and total resources devoted to the implementation exceeded USD 11 billion. However it is likely that even this figure is an underestimation because it does not contain donations from private sources. Additionally, during the implementation of the Compulsory Education Law, the budget of the MONE consistently grew and its share in the total central budget increased. The share of investment spending in the budget of the MONE remained around 20 percent until 2001 and peaked to 30 percent in 1998, the first year of the implementation of the Compulsory Education Law.

These findings regarding the effective implementation of the Compulsory Education Law are also very informative for the current transformation of basic education in Turkey. In 2012, compulsory years of schooling have been increased from eight to twelve. However a basic investigation of the budget allocated to the MONE as well as the share of investment spending in the budget of the MONE for 2013, 2014 and 2015 highlights that there is only a modest increase in the resources devoted to the MONE and the share of investment spending in the budget of the MONE is projected to remain around 10 percent until 2015. These facts raise concerns regarding the effective implementation of the twelve years of compulsory schooling law and may signify a lack of political commitment.

The analysis regarding the causal impact of increased education on fertility did not provide any statistically significant results. In contrast with available research on Turkey, the two stage least square estimations did not supply any evidence in favor of the presence of a causal link between completing eight years of schooling and on teenage marriage and fertility.

The impact of completing eight years of schooling on teenage marriage and fertility is likely to be much lower than estimated in earlier studies (Kırdar, et al., 2009; Kırdar, et al., 2011). It is very likely that previous estimates of the impact of the Compulsory Education Law on teenage marriage and fertility is confounded by the impact of the economic crisis of 2001 on the marriage market as well as the change of the Civil Code in 2002. It should be noted that patterns regarding the timing of marriage and fertility may not be very sensitive to an increase in years of schooling from five to eight because getting married at age 13 or 14 may not be the individual decision of the women and this decision may be much more tightly connected to local characteristics such as prevalence of bride’s dowry as well as other local customs and culture. It is hard to claim that the Compulsory Education Law affected these characteristics in the short run.

To summarize, this dissertation provides evidence suggesting that the Compulsory Education Law and the policy changes on teacher selection linked to KPSS had important effects on the quantity and quality of public education provision in Turkey. Nevertheless, regarding the Compulsory Education Law, it may be too early to detect its impact on other domains of human development such as teenage marriage and fertility.