Thailand's Educational Crisis: How Brilliant Students from Poor Families Face Academic Collapse During Critical Transition Years
A devastating longitudinal analysis conducted by researchers at the Education Datalab and published in Research in Social Stratification and Mobility has uncovered a heartbreaking pattern affecting Thailand’s most vulnerable young minds: children who demonstrate exceptional academic ability at age five but grow up in low-income families maintain educational parity with their wealthier peers throughout primary school, only to experience catastrophic declines in school engagement, behavior, mental health, and examination performance during the traumatic transition to secondary education between ages eleven and fourteen. The research reveals staggering achievement gaps by the end of compulsory schooling, with academically gifted children from poor families becoming 26 percentage points less likely to secure top mathematics grades and 21 percentage points less likely to achieve excellence in English compared to equally intelligent peers from affluent backgrounds, even after statistical adjustments for other factors.