Education policies
Thaksin in a meeting with the President of Brazil, Lula da Silva, in 2004
One of Thaksin's educational reforms was school decentralization, as mandated by the 1997 Constitution.[97] It was to delegate school management from the over-centralized and bureaucratized Ministry of Education to Tambon Administrative Organizations (TAOs) but met with massive widespread opposition from Thailand's 700,000 teachers, who would be deprived of their status as civil servants. Teachers fear that TAOs lacked the ability to manage schools. In the face of massive teacher protests and several threats of school closure, Thaksin compromised and gave teachers whose schools were transferred to TAO management two years to transfer to other schools.[98]
Others included learning reform and related curricular decentralization, mostly through greater use of holistic education and less use of rote learning.[99]
To increase access to universities for lower income people, Thaksin initiated the Student Loan Fund (SLF) and Income Contingency Loan (ICL) programs. The ICL however required recipients to start repayments when their salaries reached 16,000 baht a month, with interest equivalent to inflation from the day the loan was granted. The SLF had an eligibility limit on family income but interest was 1 per cent starting a year after graduation. The programs were merged and the income limit modified after Thaksin's government was overthrown.[100]
Thaksin also initiated the controversial "One District, One Dream School" project, aimed at developing the quality of schools to ensure that every district had at least one high-quality school. It was criticized, with claims that the only beneficiaries were Thaksin and companies selling computers and educational equipment. Many schools fell deeply into debt in implementing the project, receiving inadequate financial support from the central government.[101][102]
In addition, he altered the state university entrance system, which had relied exclusively on a nationally standardized exams. Thaksin pushed for greater weighting of senior high-school grades in the hope of focusing students on classroom learning rather than private entrance exam tutoring.
He initiated the Income Contingency Loan program to increase access to higher education, whereby needy students could secure a loan to support their studies from vocational to university levels. Thai banks had traditionally not given education loans. He made Thailand one of the first supporters of Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, with the Thai Ministry of Education committing to purchase 600,000 units.[103] The junta later cancelled the project.