A decade of education reform in Thailand: Broken promise or impossible dream?

This study addresses the gap between the vision of education reform in Thailand embodied in its Education Reform Law of 1997 and implementation results a decade later. Drawing upon data obtained from 162 Thai school principals, the paper analyzes trends in reform implementation across all four regions of the country and levels of the K-12 system. The results suggest that a decade following the formal initiation of education reform, changes in teaching and learning, ICT implementation and school management systems have yet to engage the nation’s teachers to a substantial degree. The results are linked to a reform strategy that has emphasized top-down implementation and a cultural predisposition to treat change as an event rather than as a long-term process.