Encounters with Uncertainty: How Secondary Education Policies Shape Parental Involvement in Schooling in Contemporary Turkey

The Turkish public education system is in crisis. After overextending to accommodate a rapidly growing young population, it ceased to function as a venue for upward social class mobility. The state has diversified secondary education and established competitive admissions instead of using public investments to standardize the quality of education. These policies created a status hierarchy of high schools following different curricula, controlling unequal resources, and serving students from different socioeconomic backgrounds. Since 2002, Justice and Development Party (JDP) governments have rolled out several new high school admission models to lessen the pressure of competitive exams on students while substantially increasing the weight of religious and vocational education at schools. These interventions have further destabilized institutionalized practices and norms in education. This dissertation examines how parents navigate their children’s transition from middle to high school in Turkey’s changing national education system. In critical sociological scholarship, parental involvement in schooling and school choices are typically seen as means to leverage unequal resources for competitive advantages against other students. This project proposes an alternative perspective on parental involvement in schooling by framing it as encounters with uncertainty. Drawing on nine months of fieldwork at a public middle school and over 130 interviews with parents, teachers, and tutors, I examine how families of eighth-grade students create a sense of stability and develop educational strategies when facing unclear institutional expectations. I also discuss how they succeed in placing high school assignments in longer life- course narratives and prepare for the future when long-term prospects and educational pathways to socioeconomic attainment appear unclear. Findings highlight three primary ways Turkish parents create a sense of predictability and engage in strategic action against the uncertainties created by the changes in the high school exam and the promotion of religious and vocational high schools. First, despite the national education field being unable to provide durable institutional expectations, interactions at educational sites produce pragmatic and temporary forms as standard frames of reference for parents looking for guidance. Schools and tutoring centers organize reviews, study halls, and mock exams, assign weekly goals and routines, and promote choice techniques for high school applications. As arbitrary as these might seem to some parents, responding to them by acceptance or rejection launches them into action. Secondly, parents adapt to the absence of durable educational norms and practices by lauding flexibility as the appropriate attitude towards exam preparation. This outlook reduces the disadvantage of making an ineffective choice because it involves routine recalibration based on student performance and well-being. Lastly, high school application deliberations frequently involve family members proposing, negotiating, and rejecting links between placement in various high schools and potential access to particular degrees, universities, and careers. Future projectivity helps the families of eighth graders navigate the ambiguity of meanings regarding the purposes of several high school types. This in-depth study of Turkish high school transitions extends the cultural sociology scholarship on education by elucidating how parents construct meaningful practices with normative and instrumental values in shifting educational fields