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Implemented in the 1960s, the policy of equal educational opportunity is rarely the subject of sociological studies in Turkey for lack of regularly available data. Mobilizing a socio-historical reading of regulatory and official documents and a field study on the experiences of school stakeholders in the management of school failure, this article aims to understand the way in which educational inequalities are represented and dealt with by these policies. While the struggle against inequalities of access is based on a liberal conception of equality by mobilizing the principles of competition and merit for access to the systems created, the struggle against inequalities of success is based on a medico-psychological conception of school failure. These two policy axes are based together on an individualizing logic which defines educational inequalities and develops the struggle in a more individual register. By aiming to manage the educational effects of these inequalities once produced rather than preventing them, these policies, which have been marked since the beginning of the 2000s by a certain privatization of education, thus serve more to deresponsabilize the political and educational fields which produced them.