Financial Times, Daniel Dombey
Recep Tayyip Erdogan is making his mark as Turkey’s first directly elected president barely a week after taking the oath of office. The former prime minister is already shifting Turkey away from customs acquired over the nine decades since the end of the Ottoman Empire, a period in which largely secularist elites held sway. Read More

The Economist
“A NEW Turkey” was the promise of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who became its first elected president on August 10th. No sooner was he sworn in than Mr Erdogan said he would move out of Ataturk’s palace, in Ankara’s secular Cankaya district, into a new state-of-the-art complex on the edge of the city. Never mind that an Ankara court ruled in February that the site was environmentally protected. “If they [the court] have the power to demolish it [the new office], let them, I shall sit in it,” Mr Erdogan said. Read More

Hürriyet Daily News, Barçın Yinanç
Turkey’s government is engaged in positive discrimination toward religious vocational schools known as imam-hatips, according to Batuhan Aydagül, the head of the Education Reform Initiative (ERG). Read More

Today’s Zaman, Yonca Poyraz Doğan
The evidence says that going to prep schools increases a student’s probability of entering university by 10 percent. This might mean a huge difference for a student. The second finding is that sending a student to a prep school is a big financial burden on a family. Third, if a child does well in school, the family of the student tries to find financial ways to send the student to a prep school; this and the first finding tell us that disadvantaged children can socially move upward if they go to prep schools. If you put all of this together, we are not convinced that shutting down prep schools will either improve quality of education in Turkey or increase educational equality,” said Batuhan Aydagül, director of the Education Reform Initiative (ERI or Eğitim Reformu Girişimi, ERG). Read More

Hurriyet Daily News, Sedat Ergin
One of the most controversial aspects of the so-called 4+4+4 educational reform bill being debated in Parliament now is that it opens the door to vocational training after the second four-year tier.  Read More

Hürriyet Daily News
A recent draft law that proposes to redefine the terms of mandatory education in Turkey opens up a debate among educators who claim that Turkey needs a more qualified education system rather than new terms Read More

Hürriyet Daily News, Emre Deliveli
A graph in a recent presentation by U.S. Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Alan Krueger created a lot of buzz in the economics blogosphere last week. Originally from a paper by University of Ottowa’s Miles Corak, it shows a negative relationship between the Gini coefficient and intergenerational earnings elasticity.  Read More

Turkish Daily News, Mustafa Oğuz
The government’s education initiative to open 17 new universities, which was passed by Parliament late on Thursday, has stirred up debate on whether it is aimed at addressing the rising demand for universities or just an election ploy. The current Parliament has established 39 universities since November 2002, with only nine out of 81 provinces in the country being left without a university. Some experts believe the government’s emphasis on higher education is misplaced and the focus should really be on vocational studies at the secondary level because Turkey suffers a serious lack of medium-level technicians. The president of the Education Personnel Union (Eğitim-Sen), Alaaddin Dinçer while acknowledging the importance of investing in university education, said the low quality of education at vocational schools was a big worry. Read More