Four ministers in two years is too many

It’s not that the new education minister is a bad choice. But just that the government’s lukewarm attention to educational issues has becomes obvious.
Since Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra came to power in August 2011, she has named four different men as education minister.
Had she carefully picked her choice, the country would have not seen four men rising to the helm of the Education Ministry in less than two years.
Her first nominee, Worawat Auapinyakul, was remembered for developing a new line of command for the country’s educational sector. He believed units under his ministry should be divided by zone when it came to the line of command. So, he assigned his deputies to oversee zones, not agencies. Worawat also boasted about a project to have students speak at least one English word a day after the daily flag-raising ceremony at schools.
All his initiatives soon disappeared. Worawat, after all, was minister for just a little over six months.
His successor, Suchart Tadathamrongvej, lasted a little longer, managing to stay at the helm for more than eight months.
During his tenure, he courted much controversy by suggesting that popular schools should be allowed to accept “tea money” and allocate such donations to help improve educational services for all. Due to strong opposition, Suchart later backtracked.
Not long after, Phongthep Thepkanjana replaced him. Under his leadership, the Education Ministry unveiled a grand plan to drastically change the country’s curriculum. In line with this, hundreds of hours are due to be removed from school students’ class schedules, to allow them to learn more outside the classroom.
Phongthep has solid reasons to support this plan. While Thai students spend many hundreds of hours in class, their academic performance is poorer on average than their peers from countries that require much less time learning.
Just a few weeks ago, Phongthep said he really hoped he would be able to complete the educational and curriculum reform during his tenure. But his hope was dashed.
Chaturon Chaisang has now replaced Phongthep as education minister.
While Chaturon has vowed to continue with Phongthep’s policies, not all educators are convinced this can happen.
Dr Chuangchote Bhuntuvech, former president of Suan Sunandha Rajabhat University, believes the repeated changes in the choice of minister had already doomed the country’s ongoing educational reform.
To him, there is nothing to hope for in educational reform anymore because, clearly, the country has not had any solid leader to spearhead and direct this reform.
Why has Yingluck changed the education minister so often?
Observers can’t help feeling she has treated this post as a political piece of cake to hand out to the politician who has given her camp good service. Perhaps, she does not really think about what the appointed minister will do for the educational sector.
Her government, after all, is very focused on populist policies. It cares much about the One Tablet Per Child scheme. It pushes hard for the project to provide seed money or soft loans to fresh graduates.
After nearly two years in office, Yingluck has attended Education Commission meetings only twice. At one of these, she instructed the Ministry to produce graduates for her government’s Bt2 trillion infrastructure mega-projects and the Bt350-billion water-management schemes.
In public interviews, Yingluck has hardly addressed educational policies.
If the government leader gives so little attention to education, the public should realise there’s really little hope of seeing any real improvement in Thai education.