Evaluation of policies to provide educational equality of opportunity in Turkey

This study aims to evaluate what are the policies, programs and projects implemented to ensure equalty of opportunity in education for economically disadvantaged students in Turkey and how they reflect on economically disadvantaged students. For this purpose, an evaluative case study was used as a qualitative research design. Data were collected through document review and interviews. The data sources of the research consist of the documents determined to answer the research problem, as well as the unions, think tanks and academicians working in this field.The content analysis technique was used to analyse the data. In the top policy documents, increasing access to education, improving the quality of education and teachers, disseminating information technologies, increasing the share of the private sector in education are aimed in a significant part of the documents in order to provide equalty of opportunities for economically disadvantaged students. In this study, it was concluded that the related objectives of increasing access to education, disseminating information technologies, increasing the share of the private sector in education were achieved, but the quality of education and teachers could not be improved. When the policies, projects and practices implemented in general are evaluated, some of them did not show continuity by being applied without being addressed with a holistic approach. It has been observed that some projects and programs that have been implemented have not been well planned, resulting in inefficient use of the allocated resources. However, since the impact analysis of some applications has not been made, it has been revealed that the aspects that can be improved for practice are not seen. It has been revealed that some projects were not shared with the public despite the impact analysis. It was concluded that the practices were not shared with the public, and the policies were not implemented within the framework of participation, transparency, accountability and were not followed effectively.