(In) equitable educational allocation by design? Social construction of government secondary schools in OBEC’s school enrolment policy text

Abstract

The process of school enrolment directly concerns with the problem of educational inequity. This is because educational inequity is a result of unequitable process of educational service allocation. This research explores how the design of enrolment policy for government secondary schools in Thailand socially constructs schools and students; and how such construction plays a role in resolving or reproducing educational inequity. Analysing the policy texts in the document called “Policy and Guidelines for Admission into Schools under Office of The Basic Education Commission in Academic Year 2018,” the research employs interpretive policy analysis methodology, the method of category analysis, and the theory of social construction of target population, which posits that the “stereotype” of policy targets (here, government schools) usually creeps into policy design and ultimately causes the policy to reproduce structural inequalities. The research identifies the assumptions by which classification of government schools and students were made in the policy texts and how each of them was assigned with certain burden or benefit with regards to enrolment opportunities and educational quality. The research finds that the policy texts have distinctly divided schools based on their position in the educational market. That is, the policy constructs ‘competitive schools’ as ‘good quality’ schools while the ‘general schools’, aka ‘not-competitive school’, are constructed as schools of lower quality. In effect, the policy has encoded differential treatments and allocated differential roles among government schools in advancing educational equity, by which the burden falls disproportionately high on the ‘general schools’ at the advantage of the ‘competitive schools’.