Even though Thailand and the United States have similar education systems, Thai and American students demonstrate different levels of academic achievement. With the recent low international rankings in education, Thailand can learn from one state in the US, Georgia, on how it has used state lottery sales to finance education.
Both countries offer 12-year free public education in addition to pre-kindergarten and kindergarten programmes, and opportunities for vocational or university-level education. Their state expenditure on education is similar, between four and five percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). They also have similar frameworks for educational attainment and learning standards.
However, the quality of Thailand's education system has come under fire in recent years due to low international rankings, low graduation rates, low student test scores and poor literacy rates. Meanwhile, the US maintains one of the strongest education programmes in the world.
How is it that two seemingly similar national programmes have such disparate results? One answer might lie in comparing a region of the US with Thailand.
Historically, the southern American states had been host to some of the country's weakest education systems. There are a multitude of regional, economic, social and historical factors that have caused this disparity. But recent education reforms have brought about striking results at increasing student retention rates, literacy, and educational achievement.
Improvements in southern education achievement have been an ongoing source of debate and political contest. At the same time, issues such as tax reform, government control and national standards have come to the fore. The southern states, therefore, have been forced to improve their educational standards with no or little funding assistance directly from the state budget.
In the US, local governments and citizens play a leadership role in education reform. This is in stark contrast to Thailand, where the central government exerts strong control on school systems throughout the country, at a loss of local initiative and financial assistance.
Among southern states, Georgia is an exemplary case of success in education reform. In the early 1990s, Georgia, which had a similar per capita GDP (or Gross State Product as Georgia is not a country) as Thailand of 2016, saw a similar percentage of public funds earmarked for education expenditures, and Georgia actually had lower high school graduation rates. Since then, Georgia has been able to raise graduation rates by nearly 20% and increase state-wide post-secondary education attainment by nearly 15%. Remarkably, Georgia accomplished their education reform not with the help of massive federal funds or an influx of taxpayer dollars. Instead, they allied with an unexpected entity: the public-minded state lottery system.
In 1993, under the leadership of then Governor Zell Miller, Georgia unveiled the Helping Outstanding Pupils Educationally (HOPE) scholarship programme. The programme is financed through state lottery sales and is designed to provide financial assistance to high achieving students that choose to attend in-state institutions. Since its inception, the relationship between education and the state lottery has provided a multitude of arrangements for educational funding including early childhood education, college preparatory programmes and university and vocational school scholarships and grants.
To date, the Georgia Lottery has paid out nearly seven billion dollars to education with (recent) yearly pay-outs at around 900 million (though accounting for only 20-30% of Lottery revenue). It has provided more than two million scholarships to degree-seeking students and has allowed over one million pre-schoolers to attend public pre-K and kindergarten programmes.
The success of the HOPE programme as an example of innovative education reform has been lauded and adopted in states throughout America. It provides a model that can also be applied to Thailand.
Thailand has a long history of lottery operations. It is recorded that the Chinese first introduced it during the reign of King Rama III, who granted a lottery operations concession to a group of Chinese businessmen in 1835. Ever since, the lottery has been an effective government apparatus to help balance the budget by collecting this regressive tax.
Similar to the situation in Georgia, the staunch supporters and the major contributors to lotteries in Thailand are the poor, who spend a far larger proportion of their income to buy lottery tickets than the rich. They buy lottery tickets with an intense hope that they would win a prize, if not the jackpot. For them, the lottery is a game of hope. The money spent on lottery tickets help keep their hopes alive that one day they will escape from the trap of the structural poverty.
This attitude also makes it difficult for Thailand, as a whole, to escape the middle-income trap. To move out of this trap, Thailand earnestly needs to improve its education quality.
Thailand can learn from Georgia's successful experience in education reform and how it financed education through state lottery sales. To do this, it needs a national leader who has strong political will to catapult its education programme to world standard.
Ironically, there is no better time for Thailand to launch education reform than now, when the country is experiencing a severe economic contraction. This downturn corresponds with the highest-ever sale of lottery tickets. This month, the number of printed tickets will be at an all-time high of 71 million (pairs of) tickets, signifying the government attempting to balance the budget on the back of low-income wage earners.
One disturbing fact is that the regressive tax that the Thai national government collects from the poor does not always yield the most benefits for those who pay. In all cases, it is the national politicians who make their own decisions how the lottery proceeds are spent with little or no connection to education.
To emulate the experience of Georgia's HOPE Programme and to the poor in really having a brighter future, Thailand needs to decentralise and devolve the responsibility for educational reform to local governments, which can be more directly and clearly align the future of children in their own jurisdiction with their own political accountability and responsiveness to the needs of the electorates. The national government then needs to contribute through an effectively run lottery.
Peerasit Kamnuansilpa is former and founding dean of the College of Local Administration at Khon Kaen University, Thailand. Larry Berman is founding dean of the Honors College at Georgia State University and Professor Emeritus, University of California, Davis, USA.