For nearly three decades, chronic inflation punished Turkey's have-nots. In 1998, at a time of unstable coalition government, one year before a devastating earthquake, and on the eve of even greater
economic crises, the country embarked on a program of poverty reduction on an epic scale. Virtually overnight, it extended compulsory primary school education from five years to eight. The program cost an average of $3 billion a year. The World Bank chipped in with two phases of $300 million to finance different aspects of the reform where it felt its involvement would make a difference. However, it is a much smaller sum-less than $10 a month-that has made all the difference to a schoolgirl in the southeast of Turkey.

Classrooms of Hope

"What sin have we girls committed?" 13-year-old Aşkın Yavuz wrote to the principal of her school. "Is it a crime to go to school?" Not a crime, exactly, but not an option either-and the threat of being denied an education caused her extraordinary unhappiness. Aşkın has no father. Her mother was remarried in a religious, but not civil, ceremony, and no one in the household has anything resembling a job. The family is desperately poor. There is hardly any furniture in the family's flat in the Bağlar neighborhood of the city of Diyarbakir, and no appliances except for a small bar heater in one of the rooms. "The winter came and went, and I couldn't afford to turn it on," the girl's stepfather says. Sending his wife's daughter to school seems an absurd luxury.

On the surface, the school Aşkın is so desperate to attend is not in much better shape than her home. It's only five years old-a product of the great expansion in Primary education-but already it badly needs a coat of paint. There are few books in the library any child would want to read, and much else is lacking as well. In fact, the only really attractive thing about the building is that the ceilings are high and it's full of light. But in her letter, Aşkın writes that she finds in the classrooms the "love and affection" she cannot find at home. And she finds something more, as well: a way to achieve her dreams. Aşkın is determined to become a lawyer, and if her family carries out its threat to keep her home from school, she swears she will kill herself.

Wanting to Make Something of Their Lives

Oya Sevinç, head of the Celal Güzelses primary school, is the recipient of As¸kin's letter. Sadly, this isn't the first letter she's received this month from a student threatening to take her own life.

At the age of 31, Sevinç is one of Turkey's heroic administrators. Her dedication to her job has cost her a first marriage, and the occasional stress and threats mean that she suffers from panic attacks. Although it's not strictly her job, she goes to persuade the family. She has a carrot at her disposal. She promises to register the family's children for an emergency assistance that will be paid monthly to an account in As¸kin's name, to be withdrawn only by her mother.

The family agrees, and the mother admits that keeping her daughter at home in this ultra-conservative neighborhood would be a form of imprisonment. "They can't even do the shopping. That's just the way things are," says Gülten Yavuz.

Most of Aşkın's friends want to make something of their lives. Greeneyed Hülya works after school washing hair at a hairdresser's, and her family supports her wish to become a nurse. Both her siblings have gone on to high school. Nurhan, unusual perhaps for a girl of 14, wants to be a judge. She used to work into the night after school at a brickyard, but has stopped so she can prepare for the competitive exams that will enable her to win a place at a state boarding high school. Nurhan has seven brothers and sisters, and, like so many other households in the overcrowded district, her family has only come to Diyarbakir recently. They left their village near the city of Mardin-whether in search of work or because they were fleeing the violence that seized the southeast of Turkey in the 1990s, no one says.

They are young people with the normal problems of adolescence who have also had to scale the equivalent of a 50-meter wall simply to keep on with their education. At school, they get books, stationery, a uniform, access to social and health services-and a dose of hope. "You never can tell," Oya Sevinç says. "Some of them will make it."

Gender Gap and Resistance

"If anything, girls are more valuable because they mold the future generation."
The extra three years of education Turkey now requires have a greater impact on girls than boys, according to Aysit Tansel, professor of economics at Ankara's Middle East Technical University. It doubles their chances of entering the labor market. "If anything, girls are more valuable because they mold the future generation," explains Hidayet Çiçek, an imam who runs a local mosque.

Even so, resistance to educating girls is high. Turkish girls are married off young, and families are more apt to place their hopes for the future on their sons. And the idea of gender equity is not universal, even among those who advocate for equal education: "Girls aren't as sturdy. Everyone knows that," Çiçek notes.

Sebahattin Çinar is the headmaster of Ünal Erkan primary school, but he has all the responsibilities of a small-town mayor. Nearly 5,000 primary schoolchildren pass through the gates of his inner-city Diyarbakir school in two shifts every day. His teachers have their work cut out for them just coping with the children who attend. It's impossible to pursue the ones who are truant.

"Sanctions don't work; the real job is to convince people," according to Salih Çelik, deputy undersecretary at the Ministry of National Education. There are a variety of reasons why children stay away from school. Some families don't believe all the years of education are worth the expense and trouble. Other reasons are simpler still-there is a shortage of classrooms, and of schools, where they are most needed.

"Sanctions don't work; the real job is to convince people."
Estimates vary, but there may be over a million children who should be at school but aren't-a figure that represents 10 percent of possible enrollment. And the estimates are that at least 60 percent of the absentees are girls. The gender gap widens as children grow older. It is wider still in rural areas, and widest of all in the southeast of the country.

Attitudes Are Changing

About an hour's drive from Diyarbakir, in the middle of the countryside, children in the Gümmetas¸ primary school sit down for a free box lunch. The school is well tended-and well attended, too. There are computers and two kindergarten classes in an annex that was once the original schoolhouse. The children who have finished their meal are the ones who have been bussed into school from neighboring villages that either have no primary school of their own or are missing grades six through eight. No one's journey is more than a few kilometers, and it's a system that should work well, apart from the days when there's too much snow to travel.

Asuman Kaçan, who lives next door, has 11 children and no qualms about sending her 13-year-old, Kudret, the short distance to school. At the moment, the girl wants to join the police, and her mother is happy for her "to be whatever she wants, to do whatever she can." Kaçan's oldest daughter, 22, was not so lucky. Even with a school in her backyard, she never learned to write.

That attitudes are changing is in evidence in a smaller village a few kilometers away. There never used to be a school here, and families sent their children by bus to Gümmetas¸ for study. Now there are two prefabricated houses in the village, emergency earthquake accommodations from the west of Turkey which have been redeployed as a temporary school.

There are 28 girls-and 11 boys-in the first two grades. Some of these girls are as old as 13 and are registered in school for the very first time.

Sait Çepik, the head teacher in the Topraktas¸ village primary school, tells how he went from house to house explaining that education was both compulsory and free, and in the best interest of the child. The two women teachers who went with him helped win the day. Now the village is eagerly awaiting the completion of a permanent school. It will still only have five grades, but that is an improvement on just five years ago when no girls went to school at all.

Commuters and Boarders

In Turkey, some 640,000 children travel to school by bus; for a great many, there is no immediate alternative. The arguments for investing in mortar rather than transport are that villages without a school of their own are being deprived of a vital social institution; that parents need contact with teachers; and that, in the early years at least, children don't actually benefit from the facilities of a larger school. Also, while the overall number of children traveling to school by bus went up, the number of girls traveling went down.

Yet parents seem happy to send their children longer distances to attend primary boarding schools. "We can fill as many places as we can provide," according to Şahin Demirkol, the deputy head of education for Diyarbakir. The boarding system, to provide a facility for children in remote regions, is not a recent innovation. The current minister of education, Hüseyn Çelik, is himself a product of the state boarding system and among its keenest advocates.

These schools meet all the children's material needs, down to a modest amount of pocket money, which may in part explain their popularity. There are some 280,000 children in the state boarding system nationwide, about a third of whom are girls.

Raising Standards

Education is a basic human right. The World Bank's priorities have been to address questions of equality and to see education as a means of battling poverty. "In the end, it doesn't really matter where you enter the debate. You end up addressing the same issues," says Robin Horn, lead education specialist for the Bank in a region that includes Turkey.

"There are few cases in the history of any national education system that can compare with these initial achievements of the Compulsory Education Program," according to Ilhan Dulger, education economist at the Middle East Technical University, in a report not otherwise uncritical of education policy. The Turkish press in 1998 saw the compulsory eight years primarily as a means of undermining a system of religious schooling which some believed had grown too powerful. "That view," says Dulger, "underestimates the real potential the reform had to improve children's lives." However, the sudden "great leap" character of the reform has left policymakers with a lot of catching up to do.

The World Bank's involvement has been to provide discretionary funding in a variety of areas; this includes not only providing computers, but integrating the right software into the curricula.

The value-added of the Bank's involvement in the renovation and construction of Turkey's schools is not financing the bricks and mortar, but setting engineering standards so that they will withstand an earthquake. Notes Deputy Undersecretary Çelik, "It's not the money that's important, but the expertise."

The question of raising standards-whether structural or educational-becomes more and more important as Turkey aspires to membership in the European Union, according to Horn. International indices of comprehension, skills, or performance in basic subjects should be the wake-up call. For example, of the 38 countries participating in the 1999 Third International Mathematics and Science Survey, Turkish eighth graders scored 31st and 33rd in mathematics and science, respectively.

The next phase for Turkish educational improvements is not just getting boys and, particularly, girls into school, but making sure they get something out of school as well.

Project Results at a Glance
Title: Second Basic Education Project
Duration: 2002-2006
World Bank loan: $300 million
Total project cost: $356.86 million
School enrollment: Increase of 1 million children by 2003 over pre-1997 level
Estimated truancy: 10 percent (1 million), with female/male ratio of 6:4

Story written by Andrew Finkel. Photos by Scott Wallace.