The military government, using Section 44 of the interim constitution, has mandated the creation of an Educational Reform Steering Committee, chaired by the education minister. This committee will supervise Thailand’s educational reforms through abolishing local Education Service Area offices and instead establishing Provincial Education Committees.
In effect, the government is undoing the 1999 Decentralisation Plan and Procedures Act and the 1999 National Education Act, two of the most important results of the 1997 People’s Constitution.
The motivation for this drastic step is simple — the Thai education system is broken.
According to the National Institute for Educational Testing Service (Niets), in Grade 12 O-Net multiple-choice exams with five choices, Thailand’s 400,000 students achieved 49.4% for Thai, 39.7% for Social Studies, 33.4% for Science, 26.6% for Mathematics, and 25.0% for English. These results indicate that the average student failed every subject.
The O-Net has been heavily condemned for consisting solely of multiple choice questions, some of which appear to be poorly written and with no correct answer, as illustrated by no student achieving higher than 81% in Social Studies this year. The tests are therefore only useful in indicating which subjects students find most difficult — English and Mathematics — and differences between provinces and regions.
The last time Niets made provincial results available to the public was 2010, when Bangkok and the Central Region outperformed every other region in every subject, with the Deep South and the Northeast competing for worst-performing region. For example, in 2010, Central Bangkok students achieved a mean score of 50.6% in Thai, compared with a mean of 39.0% for the median northeastern province, Maha Sarakham.
In fact, education in the Bangkok Metropolitan Area — a devolved administrative unit with its own education department — reaches international standards, ranking similar to the US. The 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) revealed Bangkok students achieving respectable scores of 450 for Mathematics and 455 for Science, while students in the Northeast and South trailed by over 30 points, roughly half a proficiency level.
Improving the educational circumstances of the children of the Deep South is, therefore, essential. This can be achieved by immediately increasing the number of Thai-Malay students permitted to study in their mother tongue. This can be implemented by increasing the number of schools permitted to take part in the Mahidol University and Unicef-backed pilot programme of dual language teaching, beginning with the better-resourced municipal areas.
Paradoxically, one of the best models available for implementing educational reforms is the case of municipalities, which have operated their own education departments under the Ministry of the Interior since the 1999 act.
Their experience can inform how to improve the pitiful results of the children of the Northeast. One of the main reasons behind the low regional achievement of northeastern students is urban migration of parents for work, experienced by up to 70% of families.
A function of Thailand’s uneven development and Bangkok’s status as a primate city, 40 times larger than the country’s second-largest city, leaving children with grandparents is common, as is the phenomenon of teen pregnancies. The result is a wide disparity between parents and schools’ views of the education system, exacerbated by literacy in Thai plummeting in those over the age of 50 in the Northeast.
Typically, the education system expects to contribute just over one-third of the progress in a child’s education, with the remainder coming equally from the pupil and the parents. However, families with low socio-economic status and low literacy expect schools to provide the majority of a child’s academic progress.
In this instance, schools become social services with more than just an educational challenge to meet. In the Northeast, the question of low regional IQ levels, partially due to malnutrition and low iodine levels in salt, must be urgently addressed. In addition, cognitive behavioural disorders, with multiple causes and experienced by up to 10% of students, for example in Khon Kaen municipality, one of the most prosperous in the Northeast, must be tackled.
Treating poverty-related diseases and malnutrition requires expert local help and the coordination of municipal health departments with local hospitals and provincial centres for mental health, to create health check programmes acting as safety nets. Lunch programmes and school milk programmes are common. However, municipalities are beginning to implement urgently required breakfast programmes as hundreds of thousands of students arrive at school with empty stomachs.
Another crucial problem being addressed by municipalities is teacher training, through continuous training in weak subjects such as English and programmes tailored to individual teachers.
In addition, teacher adoption of analytical and critical teaching methods is a problem, with younger teachers more adept at these skills. In the case of intransigent teachers, municipal education departments are able to hire, fire and transfer such personnel.
More change from the system is necessary, however. Under-achieving students should be detected through effective assessment, with poorly-performing students to be identified by the end of Grade 1, and with schools incentivised not to hide failure and to assess learners realistically. Schools with significant problems with literacy and numeracy should be specially exempted from regular performance assessment and focus, instead, on learning progress. At the same time, national testing must adopt predominantly open-ended questions over the next five years.
One of the few arguments for the unprecedented ultra-centralisation of educational authority is to urgently reduce the uneven development of the nation’s education system. While devolved, municipal schools are sometimes criticised for poorer performance than Ministry of Education (MoE) schools, the gap is being closed. Additionally, it should be noted that urban MoE schools can self-select students, while municipal schools have to teach the remainder.
Decentralisation has been proven to work. It remains to be seen whether placing the lives of millions of schoolchildren in the hands of committees chaired by 76 appointed governors, the legacy of an antiquated model borrowed from colonial empires, will achieve anything other than a bottleneck and the escalation of red tape.
John Draper is Project Officer, Isan Culture Maintenance and Revitalisation Programme (ICMRP), College of Local Administration (COLA), Khon Kaen University. Peerasit Kamnuansilpa, Phd, is founder and former dean of the College of Local Administration, Khon Kaen University.