Teacher education accreditation in Turkey: The creation of a culture of quality Gary M. Grossman a , Margaret K. Sands b, *, Barbara Brittingham c a Arizona State University, USA b Bilkent University, 06800, Bilkent, Ankara, Turkey c New England Association of Schools and Colleges, Bedford, MA, USA 1. Context 1.1. Introduction Education, particularly teacher education, has been of impor- tance in Turkey since the establishment of the Republic (Dewey, 1983). Many previous studies have also established the concern given to education, from the words and actions of Mustafa Kemal Atatu ¨ rk in 1923 (Mango, 2004), to present day expenditure (Hen- Tov, 2004), to public policy reforms (Dundar and Lewis, 1999). Studies related to prospective membership of the European Union (Grossman and Onkol, 2006) have been particularly relevant. Education was the thrust of the National Education Develop- ment Project (NEDP) between 1991 and 1999. The NEDP was a Turkish Government World Bank project of some $100 million US that featured two major components. The first was a reform of elementary and secondary education schooling in terms of infrastructure, textbooks, and educational management. The second, which began in late 1994, was an expansion and transformation of the national system of teacher education, focusing primarily on pre-service curriculum development and training fellowships. It was driven by an emphasis on teaching methodologies and work in schools to update the older model which emphasized subject content, with virtually no time in schools (Sands and O ¨ zc ¸elik, 1998). Related to the second component of the NEDP were two further developments. The first was the restructuring of Turkish faculties of education, aimed at enhancing the professional development of pre-service educators. The second was the preparation and piloting of an accreditation model for education faculties. The two components of the NEDP were administered by different entities in the Turkish governing structure. The elemen- tary and secondary school project was located in, and managed by, the Ministry of National Education (MONE). The pre-service teacher education project was governed by the Higher Education Council (HEC). It is the HEC pre-service teacher education project which forms the basis of the discussion here. The paper examines the introduction of new standards of accreditation into the dynamic environment that characterized Turkish teacher education in the late 1990s. The consequences of the work, and the diversity of opinion among Turkish teacher educators, were the subjects of research four years later, funded by a Fulbright grant. The research was a comprehensive examination of the reform in teacher education in Turkey during this period. The data for the present paper as well as three previous papers (Grossman and Onkol, 2006; Grossman et al., 2007; Grossman and Sands, 2008) come from this research. 1.2. The Turkish Higher Education Council and teacher education In Turkey, the Higher Education Council (HEC), which was established in 1982, is responsible for the university system. Among other functions, it determines the requirements for the promotion of academic staff and the standards for university degrees. For faculties and graduate schools of education, it also International Journal of Educational Development 30 (2010) 102–109 ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Teacher education Accreditation Educational reform ABSTRACT Turkey’s experience in developing and piloting accreditation criteria and national standards for teacher education is examined. The full implementation of an accreditation process for teacher education programs was not completed within the time of the development project. However, the effort to do so encouraged the formation of a ‘quality culture’ in the faculties of education. The paper discusses what took place and analyses the later response of teacher educators to the introduction of accreditation criteria and the way in which they were introduced. Educators largely welcomed national standards and accreditation, but wished to have flexible means of implementation. ß 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. * Corresponding author. Tel.: +90 312 290 2924; fax: +90 312 266 4065. E-mail addresses: Gary.Grossman@asu.edu (G.M. Grossman), msands@bilkent.edu.tr (M.K. Sands), Barbara_Brittingham@yahoo.com (B. Brittingham). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect International Journal of Educational Development journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ijedudev 0738-0593/$ – see front matter ß 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.ijedudev.2009.08.003