Private school choice as moral legitimation: Risk, responsibility and parenting in Türkiye

This study investigates how parents in Türkiye justify their decision to enrol their children in private schools and negotiate this choice in relation to their awareness of educational inequality. While critical school choice scholarship, particularly research conducted in England, has examined the moral and affective tensions between being a good parent and a good citizen, this article considers how these tensions are negotiated in a different policy context. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 17 private school parents, analysed through reflexive thematic analysis and informed by a governmentality perspective on risk and responsibilisation, alongside affective–discursive practice, I examine how private schooling becomes a morally defensible choice in a context where state policies have supported private provision and educational competition is shaped by high‐stakes examinations. Participants described perceived academic, social and institutional risks associated with public schooling, while presenting private schools as offering security, responsiveness and socially compatible environments. In these accounts, private schooling could appear as a parental obligation rather than simply a preference. Although 15 participants acknowledged that private schooling deepens educational inequality, they differed in how they reconciled this recognition with their choices. Some legitimised their decisions through appeals to necessity, parental care or responsibility beyond the individual family, while five expressed sustained moral conflict. The findings suggest that moral legitimation can reconfigure, without necessarily eliminating, the moral tensions of school choice, as decisions experienced as necessary may simultaneously reproduce privilege and social boundaries.