How Centralized Education Systems Reproduce Inequity: A Multi-Stakeholder Ecological Analysis of the Real–Ideal Gap in Turkish Schooling

Large, centralized education systems frequently combine ambitious egalitarian commitments at the policy level with persistent inequities at the school level. Drawing on Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory, this study uses the framework diagnostically rather than cartographically to ask how that gap is produced and sustained. The empirical material consists of 32 in-depth interviews with five stakeholder categories, namely classroom teachers, school administrators, mid-level provincial and district administrators, central ministry administrators, and academic experts in educational administration, all focused on the Turkish Education System (TES). Within each ecological layer, stakeholder accounts of the system as enacted (the real) are juxtaposed with accounts of the system as desired (the ideal); the resulting layer-specific gaps are then read for shared cross-layer structure. The analysis identifies four reproduction mechanisms: decision routines that bypass stakeholder voice, a stratified teacher labor regime that geographically sorts educational quality, donation-dependent school finance that loads the financing gap onto local communities, and the hollowing of supervision into compliance audit at the expense of its developmental function. Each mechanism couples at least two ecological layers; together they explain how a centrally produced policy ambition can leave inequity intact at the school gate. The findings argue for a methodological reorientation in ecological policy research, from describing what each layer contains to diagnosing how layers couple and have implications for centralized education systems beyond the Turkish case, including those in the Middle East, the post-Soviet space, and parts of Latin America and East Asia.