Essays on education policy issues in Turkey - Academic Commons

171 Pages·2013·2.55 MB·English

Education policy issues in Turkey

Mehmet Alper Dinçer

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
under the Executive Committee
of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
2013
© 2013
Mehmet Alper Dinçer
All rights reserved
ABSTRACT
Education Policy Issues in Turkey
Mehmet Alper Dinçer
Since the mid-1990s, public education provision in Turkey has been in constant transformation, a
result of modernization efforts connected to the political determination of governments to
complete Turkey’s accession to the European Union. During this period two nation-wide reforms
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,
in 2002, the Ministry of National Education (MONE) abandoned recruiting teachers based on
lottery and started to use teachers’ test scores instead. Following new legislation, the Center of
Measurement, Selection and Placement (ÖSYM) launched a central examination process which
is known as the Public Servant Selection Examination (KPSS).
This dissertation provides an econometric evaluation of the impact of these interventions on
education outcomes in Turkey. The dissertation seeks to establish a causal link between the
enactment of KPSS and student achievement. It presents evidence indicating that teacher
recruitment via a meritocratic, test-based assessment instead of a lottery may have a positive
impact on student achievement. The research also shows that the increase in the average student
achievement displayed by Turkey in international assessments such as PISA (Programme of
International Student Assessment) and TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science
Study) may be partially explained by the inception of KPSS.
The identification strategy for this assessment is based on the fact that the TIMMS data includes
information on teachers and test scores for each student sampled in Turkey in both1999 and
2007, that is, before and after KPSS was enacted in 2002. This allows the estimation of a
difference-in-differences model with student fixed effects. The findings highlight that students
whose teachers were recruited after the enactment of KPSS perform 0.2 standard deviations
higher than their counterparts whose teachers were recruited before the enactment of KPSS. This
finding remains stable in several sensitivity and robustness checks.
The dissertation then turns to analyzing an earlier intervention, the Compulsory Education Law
of 1997. The research estimates the impact of the Compulsory Education Law on the years of
schooling of women aged between 18 and 29. For this purpose, the dissertation uses the Turkey
Demographic Health Survey 2003 and 2008. The identification strategy is based on the fact that,
first, cohorts born after 1986 (children enrolled in grade 4 in the1996-1997 school year and later)
were subject to the Compulsory Education Law and earlier cohorts were not, and, second, the
intensity of the intervention varied between regions. Hence the investigation exploited the
between-cohort and between-region variation in intensity of the intervention to estimate the
causal impact of the Compulsory Education Law on years of schooling. The findings suggest that
the Compulsory Education Law led to a 34 percentage point increase in the probability of
completing eight years of schooling and an additional 1.5 years of schooling. Also, the
econometric results indicate that the Compulsory Education Law affected high school
completion rates, i.e. eleven years of schooling.
The analysis of the impact of the Compulsory Education Law is extended to a two-stage least-
squares (TSLS) estimation of the impact of completing eight years of schooling/additional years
of schooling on teenage marriage and fertility. The between-cohort and between-region variation
in intensity of the intervention are used to instrument completing eight years of schooling and
additional years of schooling. However, in contrast with the existing research on this issue in
Turkey, these TSLS estimations did not supply any evidence in favor of the presence of a causal
link between completing eight years of schooling/additional years of schooling and teenage
marriage and fertility.
TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES .............................................................................................................................. v
LIST OF TABLES..............................................................................................................................vii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................................ ix
CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................ 1
CHAPTER 2. THE EDUCATION SYSTEM IN TURKEY ............................................................. 4
I. Organization .............................................................................................................................. 4
II. Curriculum and instructional time ........................................................................................ 7
III. Access..................................................................................................................................... 9
A. Pre-primary level ............................................................................................................... 9
B. Primary and lower secondary levels ............................................................................... 10
C. Upper secondary education ............................................................................................. 14
IV. Quality .................................................................................................................................. 15
A. Pre-primary level ............................................................................................................. 15
B. Quality of basic education (primary, lower secondary and upper secondary levels) .. 17
V. Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 31
CHAPTER 3. TEACHER SELECTION AND EFFECTIVENESS IN TURKEY: TEACHER
TESTING AND QUALITY............................................................................................................... 33
I. Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 33
i
A. Hypotheses explaining rising student achievement ....................................................... 39
II. Review of the Literature ..................................................................................................... 42
A. Variation in teacher effectiveness................................................................................... 43
B. What explains variation in teacher effectiveness? ......................................................... 44
III. Teacher selection regimes in Turkey ................................................................................. 47
A. Overview of the teacher labor market in Turkey ........................................................... 47
B. The legal framework for teacher selection in Turkey ................................................... 52
IV. Data and descriptive information ....................................................................................... 54
V. Identification Strategy ......................................................................................................... 57
VI. Findings ................................................................................................................................ 61
A. Sub-group analysis: Female teachers ............................................................................. 62
B. Sub-group analysis: Male teachers ................................................................................. 62
C. Sub-group: Students with scores below the mean ......................................................... 63
VII. Robustness ........................................................................................................................... 63
A. Student-teacher sorting .................................................................................................... 64
B. A Time-variant factor ...................................................................................................... 65
VIII. Discussion ........................................................................................................................ 66
IX. Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 69
X. Tables ................................................................................................................................... 71
A. Estimation Results ........................................................................................................... 71
ii
CHAPTER 4. EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENT AND TIMING OF MARRIAGE AND
FERTILITY: EVIDENCE FROM TURKEY ................................................................................... 78
I. Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 78
II. Relevant studies utilizing quasi-experimental methods .................................................... 81
III. Background information ..................................................................................................... 85
A. Population change in developing countries ................................................................... 85
B. Marriage and fertility in Turkey ..................................................................................... 88
C. Compulsory Education Law ........................................................................................... 90
IV. Data and methodology ........................................................................................................ 92
A. Data................................................................................................................................... 92
B. Identification strategy ...................................................................................................... 94
V. First stage analysis............................................................................................................. 102
A. Construction of treatment/control groups .................................................................... 102
B. Impact of Compulsory Education on different levels of education ............................ 106
C. First stage estimation results ......................................................................................... 108
VI. Reduced form, ordinary least squares (OLS) and two-stage least square (TSLS)
estimations ..................................................................................................................................... 114
VII. Conclusions ........................................................................................................................ 117
VIII. Tables ............................................................................................................................. 120
A. Estimation results .......................................................................................................... 120
iii
CHAPTER 5. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS .............................................................. 138
I. Concluding remarks and policy implications ...................................................................... 138
II. Shortcomings and future research .................................................................................... 143
REFERENCES ................................................................................................................................. 147

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Student population and net enrollment rate at pre-primary level ...................................... 9
Figure 2: Access to pre-primary education by SES status and urban/rural location ...................... 10
Figure 3: Net enrollment rate, primary education ............................................................................ 11
Figure 4: Administrative records vs. survey based computation of net enrollment rates .............. 12
Figure 5: Unexcused student absenteeism (%, 2007-2010) ............................................................. 13
Figure 6: Regulated minimum outdoor space requirement in square meters per child .................. 16
Figure 7: Index of quality of pre-primary education ........................................................................ 17
Figure 8: Average scale scores in reading comprehension (PIRLS, 2001)..................................... 19
Figure 9: Percentage of 8th graders in Turkey by TIMSS science achievement benchmarks....... 22
Figure 10: Percentage of 8th graders in Turkey by TIMSS mathematics achievement benchmarks
.............................................................................................................................................................. 23
Figure 11: Percentage of students at the different levels of mathematics proficiency ................... 24
Figure 12: Percentage of students at the different levels of science proficiency............................ 25
Figure 13: Percentage of students at the different levels of reading proficiency ........................... 26
Figure 14: Variation in reading performance between schools (expressed as a percentage of the
variance in student performance across OECD countries) .............................................................. 27
Figure 15: Variation in reading performance explained by schools’ socio-economic background
(expressed as a percentage of the variance in student performance across OECD countries) ...... 28
Figure 16: Value added estimates of program types ........................................................................ 30
Figure 17: Achievements of students in Turkey, TIMSS 1999 and 2007 ....................................... 35
Figure 18: Score point change in mathematics between 2003 and 2009, PISA ............................. 36
Figure 19: Score point change in science between 2006 and 2009, PISA ...................................... 36
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