In the light of this year conference theme, it is obvious to see how public policies on education contributes greatly to the transition of societies. Through the values bridge between politics and policy, politics is a social mirror (Stewart, 2009) manipulating the direction of any  transition in societies. With this in mind, the educational public policies in the history of Turkish Republic had tremendous impact on society in terms of its transition from nationalist values to islamic and finally more neoliberal and religious society. 

In this paper, we will elaborate on three historical periods (the Single Party Era, the Multi-Party Era, and Post 2000s/The AKP Period) in Turkish Republic to understand the nature of educational policies and analyze the them in terms of policy outcomes for each historical period we identified. Because good policy analysis requires a comprehensive view of consequences and social values (Weimer & Vining, 2011), we considered taking all these three historical periods contatining critical  turning points for the Republic.  

The theoretical framework for the policy analysis will be done through Gupta’s Explanations or six "I"s provided below. These explanations will be considered for each historical era to comprehend the big picture of how Turkish government act over the years and how educational policies were different / similar in those periods.  

1.       Industralization

2.       Ideas

3.       Interests

4.       International Factors

5.       Institutions

6.       Incidents / Policy Dynamics

Turkey is a young republic established in 1923 after the Ottoman Empire. Due to its Independence war between 1919-1922, the Republic was struggling in economic, social, cultural and educational arenas. After the establishment of the Republic, there have been numerous changes in society and education called Ataturk’s revolutions (Latin Alphabets, unification of the Ministry of Education, eliminating the informal religious educational structures). During the Single Party era (1923-1945), most of these revolutionary policies intended to create transition from Ottoman way of living into this new secular and western nation state.

Because of NATO’s membership requirements, the Turkish Republic had to practice democracy which led to the beginning of the Multi-Party era in 1950 continued until the beginnings of 2000s. We can characterize this period as the transition back to the religious values coming from the Ottoman Empire synthesized with nation-state ideology. The educational policies reflected mostly bringing back the mandatory religous courses and closing down some of the revolutionary educational institutions and opening up the Theology Departments at the university levels.

Finally, when we came to the 2000s, we see some major changes in the society as a result of 13 years of uninterrupted AKP (Justice and Development Party) dominance in government. The educational policies during this era reflect the extensive use of neoliberal ideology as well as religion. 

Public policies as Peter May (2003) puts it contains set of intentions or goals of which governmental or non-governmental agencies are in charge of accomplishing. The explanations of educational public policies with regard to what interest groups the policies serve to, how they were affected by the international circumstances or which institutions were part of these public policies are  crucial to conceptualize for making sense of social transitions in the society as well as making sense of the current educational scene in Turkey.

Therefore, this paper intends to unpack each of these histroical periods in turkish Republic to understand the nature of educational public policies and to search for which ways they were divergent or not in terms of policy outcomes. In other words, our aim is to identify the patterns through Gupta's framework on educational public policies in Turkey. 

REFERENCES 1. OECD Statistics: http://www.oecd.org/statistics/ 2. OECD Education GPS reports: http://gpseducation.oecd.org/CountryProfile?primaryCountry=TUR&treshold=10&topic=EO 3. World Bank – Statistics on Education in Turkey: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.PRM.ENRR/countries/TR-7E-XT?display=graph 4. UNDP Human Development Report 2014 http://www.tr.undp.org/content/dam/turkey/docs/Publications/hdr/2014%20Human%20Development%20Report%20-%20English.pdf 5. OECD Education At a Glance Turkey 2013 Report: http://www.oecd.org/edu/Turkey_EAG2013%20Country%20Note.pdf 6. OECD Education Policy Outlook Turkey http://www.oecd.org/edu/EDUCATION%20POLICY%20OUTLOOK%20TURKEY_EN.pdf 7. May, P. (2003). Policy Design and implementation in B. Peters and J. Pierre (eds), Handbook of Public Administration. 8. Stewart, J. (2009). Public Policy Values. Palgrave Macmillan: New York: NY 9. Weimer, D.L. & Vining, A. R. (2011). Policy Analysis. Pearson: USA 10. Gupta, K. (2012). Comparative Public Policy: Using the Comparative Method to Advance Our Understanding of the Policy Process. The Policy Studies Journal, Vol. 40, No.S1, 11-26.