 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
|
|
School Council Involvement in Thai Primary Schools Darunee Jumpatong |
|
It is acknowledged that a single school in involved of its own decision-making will provide better quality education than a school run by a centralizerd bureaucracy. The basic assumption is that to establish the smaller, more locally rooted schools with self-managed practices in their governance, school will become more accountable and more efficient, as well as providing better arrangements for access and provisions responsive to the needs of the local community. As a consequence, the introduction of the self-managing school in the public sector is a significant movement and the contribution to be made through school councils is consistent with the trend towards developed systems. Education reform, as it has emerged in many countries including Thailand, has moved to respond to such trend. Thailand, due to the new Constitution of 1997, has begun to reform its educational structure and administrative system. In addition, Thailand faced the major problem of economic crisis in 1997. Since those years, there has been public criticism of the Thai educational system due to these characteristics: the centralised and ineffective system, the low level of participation of the public, and the irresponsiveness to local needs. A more decentralised educational system is the urgent need of the society. The self-managing school, therefore, is a major concept introduced tot he system where schools should be more self-managed and accountable. There major kinds of functions have been decentralised to schools: curriculum and instruction, personnel management, and resource management. In response to this, the national budgetary system has been changed from the planning and programming budget system to performance-based budgeting (PBB) where the budget is allocated in a lump sum to schools. Consequently, schools have more flexibility. As a result, one strategy in response to those changes is that community should play important roles in schooling through the establishment of school councils. The aim of my project is to study the school council involvement in the context of self-management in primary schools in Thailand. It is a qualitative-based research with a case study approach. The case studied are two "distinctive" pilot schools in the "new school-designed curriculum scheme and the PBB Project" of the Ministry of Education, Thailand. After the process of data collection of one school, the preliminary findings of my study could be raised for further consideration as follows: 1) The involvement of the schools council in small school in the rural is relatively weak. Even though the council need to get involved in schooling, but they recognise that most of the council members are low educated. As a result, they could not profoundly involve in the school-designed curriculum and instruction, school plans and budgeting, and school personnel management. The school principal and the staff, thus, are most influent actors in those three areas of management. 2) The school staff does not ensure
in the quality of the school curriculum whether it may meet the
standard. However, they are satisfactory with its responsiveness
to the community. The local culture and identity has been emphasized
while the academic achievement particularly in Thai, math, and English
needed to be improved. 4) The school council improvement measured as required. The modest requests of the school council members are that they desire more information, meetings, or even talks with the school for more mutual understanding. The school councils in Thailand have less involve in schooling and could not play important role of checks and balances within the system. Therefore, it is the urgent need for the Thai policy makers to place emphasis on this movement which would be the significant contribution to the system. |