Expanding And Improving Early Childhood Education In Turkey

Over the past decade, Turkey has experienced significant socioeconomic progress and demographic changes. The benefit of Early Childhood Education (ECE) programs is maximized when the interventions are targeted to children from disadvantaged families. This report examines the ECE provision in Turkey, and offers policy options for improving and expanding the ECE system in the future. The report endorses the goal of the expansion plan and provides detailed recommendations for achieving this ambition in an efficient and equitable manner. This report is divided into following four sections: section one gives introduction, section two presents an analytical framework for analyzing early childhood interventions, section three conducts an in-depth analysis of ECE in Turkey and identifies key challenges, and section four recommends and outlines proposals for a dual-program strategy for expanding quality ECE in Turkey.

With child development trajectories thus diverging early in life, pro-equity policies should focus on reaching the most disadvantaged children early, ideally before birth. Turkey, with the active involvement of nongovernmental organizations, has piloted a number of highly successful programs to reach and support disadvantaged children. But it can do more: only 6 percent of the country's total public social spending reaches children below the age of six. About four times more is spent on a middle-aged or elderly person than on a child. --

Human capital theory, developing children as future workers, shapes thinking about early childhood education policy around the globe. International contributors problematize this thinking and offer alternatives.

Life Chances finds that if today's under-40 Turkish adults had all benefited from one year of preschool education when they were 6 years old, family incomes could be up to 8 percent higher, one-tenth of poor families would not live in poverty today, and about 9 percent more women--in other words, millions--could be working or looking actively for a job. --Book Jacket.

This volume makes a comprehensive assessment of the status and quality of early educational experiences at preschool and early primary grades in India. It raises a serious concern that despite high enrolment in preschools, children’s school readiness levels remain low at ages five and six, and raises a vital question---are Indian children getting a sound foundation for school and for later life? It addresses three important issues from the Indian perspective: children's school readiness at age five; families' readiness for school; and, most importantly, the readiness of schools for children. India is one of many countries across the global South facing an early learning crisis. High quality early childhood education may be key to improving these outcomes for children, yet little is known about early childhood education programs in India and their impact on children’s school readiness. This volume is based on a longitudinal, mixed methods research study which is perhaps the first of its kind in India. The study covers public provisions along with steadily expanding private pre-schools and schools in rural India and provides interesting narratives and insights into the multiple pathways children are adopting in these critical early years, particularly in the context of the expanding role of the private sector. Written in a lucid and narrative style, this volume is of interest to a diverse readership of researchers, educationists and early childhood education policy makers and practitioners in terms of both its design and findings.

This paper considers changes in children's early health and education opportunities and outcomes in Turkey. The study aims to look at changes in health utilization, nutrition, access to early childhood education and school enrollment rates for children between 2003 and 2008. The findings suggest that health utilization has improved over time in these years and access to health care has increasingly become delinked from initial circumstances of children in the household, in parallel to Turkey's expansion of the Health Transformation Program. On the other hand, nutrition outcomes remained correlated with maternal education and household wealth status. Access to early childhood education and care programs also came out to be highly regressive, with only households and children in the top quintile having access to child care programs outside the home. The paper also considers later educational attainment outcomes for older children, by circumstance groups and finds that while some progress has been made in enrollment in basic education in these years, variables that define gender, mother tongue spoken at home and parental education remain significant determinants of early drop-outs as of 2008. In the final section, the paper investigates exposure of a certain small group of children in Turkey to multiple risk factors at the same time, and evaluates the incidence by circumstance group the probability of facing overlapping risks in early childhood. the paper argues that children in these circumstance groups, and that have exposure to multiple risk factors, should be the primary target of social protection and early childhood intervention programs.

Early childhood is the most important stage of human development yet in Middle East and North Africa countries there is little research and inadequate investment in this crucial stage of life. This book covers risk, protective factors, policies and programs that can address inequality and shortfalls in the early years of life.

Neoliberal policies have had an impact on educational systems globally. This book provides a detailed and critical analysis of neoliberal educational policies and reforms in Turkey by focusing on the Justice and Development Party's reform efforts over the last eight years.

Comparative Education: The Dialectic of the Global and the Local, Third Edition brings together many of the outstanding scholars in the field of comparative and international education to provide new perspectives on the dynamic interplay of global, national, and local forces as they shape the functioning and outcomes of education systems in specific contexts. Various chapters in the book call for a rethinking of the nation-state as the basic unit for analyzing school-society relations; provide new ways of conceptualizing equality of educational opportunity and outcomes; call attention to the need to study social movements in relation to educational reform; emphasize the value of feminist, postcolonial, and culturally sensitive perspectives to comparative inquiry into the limitations as well as potential of education systems to contribute to individual development and social change; and provide detailed critical accounts of how various international financial and technical assistance agencies shape educational policy and practice in specific regions of the world.