The invisible costs of education reform: Understanding teacher deprofessionalisation in Thailand

Abstract Thailand's education reform, formally initiated via the National Education Act 1999, has positioned teachers not only as the most important ‘implementers’ of policy but also as a profession in serious need of development. Its various measures include the re‐professionalisation of the teaching profession, as well as the introduction of neoliberal mechanisms that make the work of teachers and schools more ‘visible’, ‘traceable’ and ‘manageable’. However, previous research, news coverage and public sentiment have indicated that teachers increasingly experience burnout, disempowerment and detachment from their professional identity and agency, with many leaving their jobs despite the benefits of being in the civil service. This paper draws on in‐depth semi‐structured interviews with 18 teachers, as part of a larger study examining teachers' deprofessionalisation in Thailand's basic education system. Informed by social constructionist, critical policy and policy ethnography perspectives, data analysis surfaced seven different but interrelated ways in which teachers experience deprofessionalisation. While many of these share similarities with neoliberal education systems of the Global North, they also demonstrate unique distinctions to the Thai teachers' experience arising from pre‐existing power relations, bureaucratic structures, institutional cultures, social discourses, traditional expectations and a regime of ‘upward accountability’ operating throughout the education system. Informed by the centrality of bureaucratic structures and hierarchical relations, the 'upward' accountability, governmentality and performativity that teachers enact are directed towards those above them in the command chain, rather than market demands as is the tendency in the Global North. The deprofessionalisation experienced, then, is more a result of complying with (and pleasing) commander‐supervisors than of working towards indicators per se. These insights offer a vivid account of how even the best‐intentioned policies can have unintended, cumulative and lasting effects on the individuals critical to their enactment. They also make visible the challenges many teachers thought to be private and individual, offering a ‘vocabulary’ for understanding deprofessionalising experiences in more concrete terms.