Academics Unimpressed With Education Minister Woravat

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Academics unimpressed with Woravat

Wannapa Khaopa

The Nation

Being unable to clearly show how to improve quality of education, the country's big problem, over the past four months since he took the Education Minister post, Woravat Auapinyakul's performance is unable to impress academics.

Many of them said his tablet handout policy that he has given priority to was not a good solution for reaching quality education, while educational improvement strategies issued in the second decade of education reform during the Democrat-led government had not been continued.

Woravat was appointed to the post in early August.

Assoc Prof Sombat Noparak, president of the Thailand Education Deans Council, said the new breed teacher project - another important project that had been set up to put more qualified teachers in the education system in an attempt to upgrade the education quality - had been halted as well.

"There is no move. It will affect directly the students who enrolled at Faculties of Education at universities under the project. They don’t know their fate if they will receive scholarships or be guaranteed teaching positions as Woravat has not done anything nor assigned any of his deputy ministers to oversee the project."

"Teachers are really important for education. The new breed teacher project is not this government’s policy. Indeed, it should be main policy of every government," said Sombat.

Therefore, he urged Woravat to decentralise power to them to help him move forward many policies.

Chainarong Indharameesup, chairman of Boyden global executive search, who is also on the education reform policy committee, said doing so was not a good idea. The ministry had to prepare new teachers to replace almost 200,000 teachers who would retire over the next 10 years.

In addition, a source said the minister did not want to continue policies initiated by the past government, but preferred to introduce the new ones.

Sombat said the minister had not planned systematically how to upgrade quality of students in every level.

"We've seen only new projects that he has initiated with new ideas to solve only some educational problems. We've not seen how or what he will do, what he targets to achieve and which tools he will use to put the projects into practice. Nothing is clear about the implementation after he announced the projects," he added.

"Some policies will help him gain votes from people related to the education rather than help increase quality of education, for instance teachers’ debt solving. And, distributing tablets and other object cannot raise the quality," Assoc Prof Witayakorn Chiengkul, honour dean of the Social Innovation College at Rangsit University said.

Witayakorn said Woravat considered and solved the educational problems separately.

"His area-based policy that aims at finding various strengths of different areas in the country and equipping students with strengths discovered in their own communities is a good idea, but it is not easy to succeed. This policy relies on universities, which have not conducted enough research in local communities surrounding them. They teach students from textbooks written by Westerners. To achieve this, the minister has to change the universities’ concepts (to focus on communities)," Witayakorn said.

Chainarong pointed out that since the Education Ministry was a big organisation with hundreds of thousands of teachers and involved with tens of millions students and parents, it was quite a tough job when Woravat decided to introduce new policies to them. "It is very difficult to change the direction and make those who are involved with the education to understand and follow the new policies. The area-based policy is good but how he will have to communicate with them to gain cooperation. Lots of them still don’t understand the child-centred policy and how to teach according to the policy although it was introduced many years ago."

Sombat gave only four scores out of ten to Woravat in terms of his performance while Witayakorn gave him five, saying his performance was not as good as it should be.

All the three academics don’t want Woravat to rush implementing the One Tablet PC per Child policy, but told him to carefully do it.

However, Prof Pavich Tongroach, chairman of Nakhon Phanom University Council and Kalasin Rajabhat University Council, supported Woravat’s decision on the issue, saying the timing was appropriate. But, he warned him to make sure that the ministry would be able to provide contents and software good enough for students’ use and prepare teachers, parents and other relevant people well enough. "To provide only good hardware will waste the budget."

-- The Nation 2011-12-27

[Rhys]

Invest in teacher development....

Edited December 27, 2011 by Rhys

[TPI]

The guy has no real experience and like most of the newbies in Parliament is barely literate in any language! It comes under the P.T. mantra of "jobs for the boys": 1) a nobrainer with a huge budget and 2) The only people he screws up (students) generally can't vote!

It's all really very sad!