A Sociological Analysis of the Right to Education: Reflections from Turkey Funda Karapehlivan Senel

A Sociological Analysis of the Right to Education: Reflections
                        from Turkey

                             Funda Karapehlivan Senel

Abstract
Although there has been a recent expansion of academic interest in the theory and practice
of Rights, a specifically sociological approach to this topic (rather than a legal or political
science approach) has yet to develop. This article aims to contribute to the emerging field of
sociology of human rights by analysing the right to education from a sociological perspective.
A political economy approach will be adopted for the analysis of the right to education which,
as Ted Benton argues (2005) requires an analysis of power relations and structural
inequalities in capitalist society. The article will have a critical approach to liberal-individualist
theory of human rights which has emphasized civil and political rights without considering the
effects of the economic, social, cultural and political inequalities of capitalist societies on the
realisation of these rights. It will argue that economic, social and cultural rights, on the other
hand, despite their formal recognition, have been reduced to ‘consumer rights’ with the
dismantling of the welfare state and privatisation of public services since the 1970s. Based on
the macro and micro level analyses of the field research I conducted in Turkey, this article
explores the possibility of provision and enjoyment of the right to education within the
current neoliberal socio-economic structure.

Introduction
Although there has been a recent expansion of academic interest in the theory and practice
of rights, a specifically sociological approach to this topic (rather than a legal and political
science approach) is still in its early stages. In this paper I aim to explore and discuss the right
to education from a sociological perspective by looking at the restructuring of education in
the context of neoliberal transformation since the 1970s. I adopt a political economy
approach (Chomsky and Herman, 1980; Benton, 1993, 2006; Evans, 1998; Morris, 2006:17-19)
for the analysis of the right to education in which as Lydia Morris says ‘an emphasis is placed
on the holistic understanding of a social formation, through a focus on the political and
economic relationships that underpin social life’ (Morris, 2006:17). The political economy
approach requires an analysis of power relations and structural inequalities in capitalist society
(Benton, 2005; Evans, 1998).

Despite the formal recognition of economic, social and cultural rights under international law,
the hegemonic neoliberal discourse prioritizes the civil and political rights; therefore there is a
considerable gap between the recognition and the achievement of these rights (Arat, 1999;
Thomas, 1998). Ted Benton (1993) notes that the contrast between formal and substantive
rights is central to the ‘sociological critique’ of liberal rights. As he argues it is the bourgeois
socioeconomic relations which make rights substantively unrealizable (1993:112). In other
words, if individuals are in practice unable to obtain the necessary skills or resources to
exercise rights because of the socioeconomic inequalities, rights become purely formal and
ineffective (Benton, 1993:118). Thus sociological critique of the liberal-individualist
formulation and practice of rights needs to focus on ‘broadening and equalizing the range of
capabilities enjoyed by [individuals]’ (Elson, 2006:105). Diane Elson calls this ‘transformative

equality’ which has to be ‘underpinned by supportive economic, social and political structures
that enable people to experiment and take risks by guaranteeing their enjoyment of the
economic, social and cultural human rights’ (2006:105).

This article attempts to highlight the gap in formal and substantive rights in relation to the
right to education by drawing on the case of Turkey. It is concerned with the possibility of
provision and enjoyments of the right to education within the current neoliberal socio-
economic structure. It also asks how successful the right to education is in addressing the
current social, economic and political realities? The article will focus on the introduction of
market relations into primary education and their implications on the right to education in
the process of neoliberalisation of Turkey. What I argue is that we need to supplement the
legal theory and normative principles of the right to education with sociological theories of
education and we also need to change the way we study and analyse the right to education by
looking at not only macro level and provision side of it, but also by looking at the micro level
and enjoyment side of the right to education. In other words we need to look at the
relationships between global, national and local and to combine different levels of analysis in
order to have a better understanding of the social reality we are studying. I will try to
illustrate these points by using a part of the micro level analysis of my field research as an
example. But first I am going to give an overview of the meaning and the core content of the
right to education and introduce the analytical framework which I used for the analysis of the
right to education. Then I will explain the research method I employed for this analysis. The
subsequent section briefly looks at the neoliberalization process and its implications for the
education system in Turkey. I will finish by presenting some of the findings from the micro
level analysis of my research.

The right to education: An overview
Education has been recognised as a human right since the adoption of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and this has been reaffirmed many times in other human
rights treaties like the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the
International Convention on the Rights of the Child and Convention on the Elimination of All
Forms of Discrimination Against Women. A list of various human rights treaties which
contains articles on the right to education can be found in the Box 1 below. According to the
first Special Rappoteur on the right to education of the United Nations Commission on
Human Rights, Katarina Tomasevski (1999), these human rights treaties define the core
contents of the right to education. These are to ensure that primary education is all-inclusive,
free and compulsory; to guarantee parental choice in the education of their children; to apply
non-discrimination to the right to education and human rights in education and to prevent
abuse of education by defining what education is for. In her report in 2000, she, furthermore,
adds that according to international human rights bodies the requirement upon governments
to make primary education free implies that governments should eliminate financial obstacles
in order to enable all children – no matter how poor – to complete primary schooling.
Imposing a requirement upon children to attend school whose cost their parents cannot
afford would make compulsory education illusory (Tomasevski, 2000).

The United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights’ General Comment
11(1999) describes the character of the right to education as follows: ‘[the right to education]
has been variously classified as an economic right, a social right and a cultural right. It is all of
these. It is also, in many ways, civil right and a political right, since it is central to the full and

effective realization of those rights as well. In this respect the right to education epitomizes
  the indivisibility and interdependence of all human rights’.

  Box 1: Selected Human Rights Treaties Containing Articles on the Right to
  Education

    - Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948),
      Article 26
    - International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966),
      Article 13, 14
    - International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966),
      Article 18(4)
    - Declaration on the Rights of the Child (1959),
      Principle 7
    - International Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989),
      Articles 28, 29
    - International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (1966),
      Article 5
    - Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (1963),
      Article 8
    - Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (1967),
      Articles 9, 10
    - Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (1979),
      Article 10
    - Declaration on Social Progress and Development (1969),
      Article 10
    - UNESCO Convention Against Discrimination in Education (1960),
      Article 5
- Additional Protocol to the American Convention on Human Rights in the Area of Economic,
  Social and Cultural Rights (Protocol of San Salvador) (1988),
      Article 13
    - European Convention on Human Rights, Protocol 1 (1954),
      Article 2
    - European Social Charter (Revised) (1961),
 Article 17
    - African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (1981),
      Article 17(3)
    - African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child
      Article 11
- Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women
  in Africa
      Article 12
    - American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man (1948),
      Article 12

  Following this description, two aspects of the right to education can be identified with regard
  to State obligations. On the one hand, the realization of the right to education demands an
  effort on the part of the State to make education available and accessible. It implies positive

State obligations like to make primary education free and compulsory and secondary and
higher education available and accessible to all. This may be called the social aspect. On the
other hand, there is the personal freedom of individuals to choose between State-organized
and private education, which can be translated, for example, into parental freedom to decide
their children’s moral and religious education according to their own beliefs and thus the
freedom of natural persons or legal entities to establish their own educational institutions.
And this may be called the freedom aspect of the right to education (Coomans, 1998:2).

This article employs an analytical framework developed by Tomasevski (2001; 2003). This
basic framework outlines the government obligations through the explicit guarantees of the
right to education. According to this framework, the core content of the right to education
which emerges from these guarantees can be structured into a 4-As scheme. Governments
are obliged to make education Available, Accessible, Acceptable and Adaptable (Tomasevski,
2001). This article will focus on two of the As, namely availability and accessibility. Availability,
as Tomasevski (2003) explains, embodies two different types of government obligations: the
right to education as a civil and political right requires the government to permit the
establishment of schools, while the right to education as a social, economic and cultural right
requires the government to ensure that free and compulsory education is available to all
school-age children. Accessibility is defined differently for different levels of education. For
primary education, according to this principle, the government is obliged to secure access to
education for all children in the compulsory age range. Moreover, compulsory education
ought to be free of charge (Tomasevski, 2003).

However, this framework is only concerned with the assessment of the obligations of the
right to education by states by doing macro level analysis either by looking at the national
level or cross-national level. The indicators used for this assessment include the net
enrolment rate, the required level of teacher training, percentage of teachers who have
reached it, and composition of teaching staff; the percentage of government expenditure
spent on education and expenditure per pupil. In this article, I extend Tomaseveski’s
framework by including a micro level analysis of the enjoyment aspect of the right to
education.

A multilevel mixed method
For doing this I am employing a multilevel model of mixed methods research strategy
(Creswell and Plano Clark, 2007) which combines macro and micro level analysis by using
both quantitative and qualitative research methods. It aims to obtain different but
complementary data on the same issue to best understand the research problem. Hence I am
combining these two levels of analyses in order to understand the consequences of the
changes at the macro level structural relations and macropolicies on the micro level, namely
the school level. By including a micro level analysis to Tomasevski’s framework I seek to get a
more comprehensive picture of the social phenomena. Because when we look at the macro
level data and relevant legislation we see that compulsory primary education in Turkey is free
of charge and guaranteed by the Constitution. However, as I will show below, the micro level
analysis reveals another face of the fact. For the micro level analysis I used a case study design
and collected data by conducting semi-structured interviews, group interviews and participant
observation with parent, teachers and head teachers of the two case schools.

The micro analysis aims to help us to understand how the neoliberal policies are experienced
by different actors like teachers, parents and communities in education sector and how these
actors are affected by them. Moreover it aims to see the effects of the policy of underfunding
of education at school level and to find out the ways applied by schools to overcome the
financial problems, for example what kind of payments parents are making to schools, what
kind of activities headteachers, teachers, parents and students are involved for creating
income for the schools. Furthermore the micro analysis aims to find out the impacts of
parents’ capacity to make the payments on the conditions of schools and consequently on the
quality of education given at schools.

Neoliberalism and the restructuring of education in Turkey
The last thirty years have seen a growing number of attempts in different parts of the world
to restructure and deregulate state schooling. At the centre of these policies have been
moves to decentralize educational bureaucracies and to create in their place devolved
systems of education entailing significant degrees of institutional autonomy and a variety of
forms of school-based management and administration. In many cases, these changes have
been linked to enhanced parental choice (Bowe et al., 1997) or an increased emphasis on
community involvement (Bray, 1996) in schools. Such policy initiatives often introduce a
market element into the provision of educational services (Whitty et al., 1998:3). This may
involve privatizing them both by involving private sector providers and by handing over to
individuals and families decisions that were previously a matter of public policy (Belfield and
Levin, 2002:19). Most of the time, it involves making public services behave more like the
private sector (Whitty et al., 1998:3). One of the most important educational reforms
associated with neoliberalism is the decentralization of educational administration and finance
which materializes in the form of community finance.

Neoliberals have argued for the marketization of education and for the price system in
allocating education on the grounds of inadequate revenues, misallocation of resources,
parental choice and inefficiency (Lauder et al., 1999). On the other hand public provision of
education has been justified on the grounds of externalities of education, equity issues,
market failure, high returns of education (Colclough, 1996) and on the basis of education as a
human right (Tomasevski, 2003). The combination of neoliberal economic restructuring in the
world economy and the powerful ideological conceptions of how educational delivery needs
to be changed, spread by international financial institutions as a consequence of the
globalization process has been having a significant impact on educational systems worldwide.
However, despite the introduction of market relations, education still largely provided,
funded and regulated by the states, especially in centralized systems like Turkey’s.

Public schooling expanded immensely after the Second World War. The supply driven
expansion of schooling has got into trouble especially in the developing countries with the
debt crisis in 1980s. With introduction of structural adjustment programmes (SAPs)
governments were forced to cut public expenditures and in some countries, like Kenya and
Malawi were forced to introduce school fees at primary level by the World Bank. As a result
governments have become less able to bear the increasing costs of public services, including
education.

Turkey started its long and slow process of deeper integration with the world markets with
the implementation of neoliberal reforms in January 1980 under the stabilisation agreements
and SAPs. Until 1980, Turkey’s economy was shaped by import-substitution industrialization

programmes which used protectionism, state involvement, regulated markets, state’s
provision of goods and public services as its instruments. With the introduction of SAPs,
export-led growth model was adopted and aforementioned instruments were replaced by
liberalisation of interest rate, deregulation of markets, privatisation of state enterprises and
public utilities and decreases in public expenditures on social services. The increasing scope of
commodification and private provision of public services have been the dominant features of
the adjustment period. The application of neoliberal policies to education and other public
services has been intensified since the mid-1990s. If we look at the latest figures taken from
UNESCO (See Table 1), we can see that after reaching to 92% in 2002, net primary
enrolment rate declined to 89% in 2005, to the 1991 level (UNESCO, 2007). According to
2005 Education For All global monitoring report Turkey’s total spending on education
increased 21% between 1998-2001. However in 2003 public expenditure on education was
still 3.7% of the GDP which is lower than the world average of 4.8% (UNESCO, 2005).

Table 1: Gross and Net enrolment rates in primary education, Turkey
                                                                                       2005
Primary                              1991        1999     2002         2005
                                                                                  Regional average
             MF                 99               ...     99          93              103
    GER
    (%)      M                 103               ...    103          96              105

             F                  95               ...     95          91              102

             MF                 89               ...     92          89               91
    NER
     (%)     M                  93               ...     96          92               91

             F                  85               ...     89          87               90
Source:UNESCO (2007), Institute for Statistics

Then how do we explain the increase in total education expenditure? A recent study (Chawla
et al., 2005:23-24) done for the Turkey’s Education Sector Study prepared by the World Bank
showed that in 2002, 7 per cent of the GDP was spent on education in total which is about
13 billion dollars, however only 4.3 per cent of this was the public spending on education, the
remaining 2.7 per cent was the private expenditure. These figures show that almost half of
expenditure on education is funded by the private sources. Moreover, as the same study
shows 32.5 per cent of this out of pocket spending went to fund public primary schools
(Chawla et al., 2005:33).

Turkey has one of the most highly centralized education systems among middle-income
countries. According to OECD data, 94% of all educational decisions in Turkey are made at
the central level (cited in World Bank, 2005:27). As reported in Turkey Education Sector
Study paper (World Bank, 2005) and also reported by the head teachers and teachers I
interviewed individual schools are not given any resources to manage and do not have any
budgetary or spending authority. However it must be added that they do not have any ‘public’
resources to manage, because primary schools in Turkey are depending on the financial
contributions of parents and other private sources for their recurrent needs. One of the head
teachers I interviewed reported that ‘the Ministry officials tell us that “you have to solve your
own financial problems. The state can support only to some degree. You need to mobilize
local opportunities”. This is the way of telling schools that they must get the money they need
from the local sources mostly from parents. So the government leaves schools alone in terms
of financial issues. As a result an extreme version of decentralization emerges.

Today, in Turkey, even though the vast majority of schools are classified as public institutions
operated by the government, in increasing number of schools, especially in the cities and
particularly in the middle class areas of the cities, a large proportion of the resources comes
from households, communities and other non-government sources. The resources provided
may be in the form of cash contributions, materials, labour and land. Therefore the income of
the schools is determined by the number of students and by the income of parents. A
research done in Ankara showed that parents are making payments for 26 different items at
the primary education schools (Akca, 2002). However, the Constitution and the basic laws
which regulate the Turkish national education system guarantee free primary education. At
the beginning of every academic year this fact has been emphasized by the Ministry of
Education. The Minister and other officials give statements saying that donations given to the
school are not compulsory. On the other hand, the Ministry of Education encourages parents
with directives to make donations on the grounds of insufficient resources.

Reflections from school level
This brings us to the micro level analysis I mentioned above. In this article I am going to
present some of the findings from my fieldwork I conducted in Ankara in 2004. For the micro
level analysis two schools were chosen in Ankara located in geographically close but socially
different areas of the city. In this I will focus on one of the schools. It is going to be called
School A hereafter. For this case study I conducted participant observation during my two
visits to School A, did interviews with the head teacher and a teacher and with five parents
and had informal discussions with three other teachers. School A is located in a middle class,
suburban area. It is a new settlement. Most of its residents are middle class professionals.
Although it is a new suburban area, there is still a valley which contains the last houses of old
shanty town. School A was built in 1997. It had 936 students in 2003 academic year. When he
was asked about the social backgrounds of their students, the head teacher said that they had
students from every social class, from very high income families to very low income families.
Yet as I mentioned above there is a shanty town in the School A’s zone and children of that
shanty town attend to School A. The residents of that area are generally from working class
with low income. So there are students from working class families in School A. According to
the account of the head teacher because School A was a very good school compare to the
other state schools, there was a high demand from parents. School A attracted students from
very different and far districts of the city.

School A has a big, clean and well-maintained building and a big yard and a playground. In
most of the classrooms students had their own cupboards to leave their books, notebooks
and other materials. Moreover, as it was observed during the visits and understood from the
interviews, almost every class has its own educational materials like TV, VCD/DVD player,
overhead, wall boards, and so on. Having these materials depend on the income of the
students in the class and on the willingness of parents to buy these materials, and also on the
teacher. If a teacher wants parents to buy something for the class, she has to ask money from
them. Some teachers did not want to force parents to buy those expensive items. An
important point about these materials is that if a class does not own them, they do not and
cannot use the materials other classes have. This fact shows that even in the same school
there are inequalities in terms of quality of education. As Rifat Okcabol (2007) rightly puts, it
might be said that if there are 40,000 primary schools in Turkey, there are 50,000 different
qualities of education caused by the community financing of education.

The money collection is done generally through mothers. According to the accounts of the
teacher and the parents a mother is chosen by the teacher and after that she is called ‘class
mother’. Class mother is generally a member of the school-parents union or the school
protection association. Class mothers are similar to class assistants. Class mother’s first duty
is collecting contribution shares. As it is understood, in addition whenever something is
needed and decided to be bought for the class, she is the one who collects the money. In this
process she also does the market research and finds out about the prices and calculates how
much each student needs to give. At the end it is either her or the teacher who buys the
item. However being a class mother requires being at the school very often for many hours.
For that reason class mothers are generally housewives. Yet the money collection process is
not a smooth one because of the disputes between parents or the parents who cannot afford
to give money whenever it is asked. Therefore teachers often end up collecting the money
instead of class mothers. In School A parents were asked to pay for educational materials,
television, VCD/DVD player, overhead, wooden wall panelling, cupboards, blank papers,
student’s report cards, for maintenance charges like broken windows or doors, for social
activities such as sports, folkloric dances, and theatre. Payments for social and sportive
activities create another inequality amongst the students from different social backgrounds,
because students who can pay for the necessary equipments, clothes or tickets can take part
in such activities. This account was reported with regard to money collection was reported
by the parents and teachers.

The head teacher, on the other hand, had a different account regarding the money collected
in the school. He said that the only payment made by parents was the contribution shares.
However later in the interview he said that educational materials like TV and overheads were
bought by parents.mWhen he was asked how they were solving problems that they were
facing everyday like broken windows and cleaning, the head teacher reported that the school
administration itself solved them with donations made by parents. On the other hand, parents
said that those problems was solved by the parents from School Protection Association and
with the money donated to the association.

Conclusion
As it appears from the different and conflicting accounts of different actors, there is a chaotic
situation regarding financial issues in schools in Turkey. A major problem derives from the
lack of regulation and the conflict between the practices and rules. The under-funding of
education, highly centralized structure of the system and financial restrictions on the school
administration give rise to further problems.

In brief, education sector in Turkey is in a transitional period. What we see here is a chaotic
environment created by the introduction of market-like practices without the changes in the
legal and administrative regulations. Regarding financial problems schools were left alone by
the State. Therefore every school and sometimes every class have to create their own
resources. This means neoliberal educational policies both increase existing inequalities and
create new forms of inequalities in education. As a result quality of education in schools and
educational attainment become more dependent on the economic and cultural capital of
families. So neoliberal educational policies deteriorate the enjoyment of the right to
education by increasing the inequalities in education. However, as I explained above the core
content of the right to education is also insufficient as in its present definition, because it
cannot address the new social and economic conditions created by the neoliberal governance
of education, especially the inequalities. Therefore we need to situate human rights in general

and the right to education in particular, in the context of inequalities in order to achieve a
transformation in capitalist economic and social structures.

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