Expelling ghosts

Allegations that some private schools collected government subsidies for over 19,000 “ghost” students in the senior high school program (SHS) have raised public concern. The “ghost” tag implies fraud, difficult to dismiss outright, given corruption issues that have plagued the Department of Education (DepEd). Schools concerned have promised to provide proof that the subsidies supported real students.

The Private Education Assistance Committee (PEAC) thus preferred to speak of “undocumented voucher program beneficiaries.” Longer, but legally safer; equating “undocumented” with “ghost” requires more evidence. Sadly, the public will tend to see ghost stories in media as yet another example of chronic corruption. In fact, PEAC has already recommended dropping 32 schools and required the return of some P300 million.

In 2023, the voucher program had a budget of over P23 billion and covered about 1.3 million students in over 4,500 private schools. But negative publicity can cause damage beyond the value of government resources actually squandered. Doubts cast on the integrity of the voucher program, the prime example of public-private sector complementarity, undermine an almost universally applauded approach to education reform.

Funds for the original voucher program of the 1980s came from World War II reparation payments committed to the private sector in the Philippines by the United States government. Pooling these payments into what became the Fund for Assistance to Private Education (FAPE) needed the approval of the Philippine government, giving a public character to a private sector initiative proposed to the Kennedy administration by private higher education leaders in the Philippines. With American support, management of FAPE was entrusted to the private sector, with PEAC running the programs of the Government Assistance to Students and Teachers in Private Education (GASTPE).

GASTPE’s initial project was the “Education Services Contracting” program (ESC), which compensated private high schools for taking students that DepEd could not accommodate. ESC was not designed to help the poorest of the poor. It was a coping mechanism to enable the government to comply with the constitutional mandate to provide basic education to the Filipino youth.

PEAC’s successful management of ESC made it logical for government to enlist its help in implementing the SHS voucher program. Again, the recourse to PEAC did not serve a pro-poor, affirmative action agenda. Congress had enacted the K-12 in 2013 making SHS mandatory. But it was obvious that the public education sector could provide seats for only about 60 percent of the initial SHS cohort and needed the private sector to cover the gap.

Among many, current proposals to address education problems, plans to scale up the current voucher program for high school students and to expand its scope to cover elementary education has received almost universal support. Suspicions of ghosts populating the voucher program unjustly place these plans at risk.

Experience in running the ESC had alerted PEAC to the risk of ghost voucher students. As the number of voucher applications and the value of the subsidy increased, PEAC developed in 2004 a quality certification process for private schools seeking participation in the program. PEAC proposed a similar process for SHS to DepEd in 2015, but it could not be installed in time for the scheduled program launch in the 2016-2017 school year.

Not unexpectedly, managing the transition of some 1.5 million Grade 10 students to Grade 11 in private and public schools, encountered problems in data collection, processing, and retrieval, leading to delays in private school collection of subsidy payments. For the government, the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown of schools and the adoption of distance learning modalities made even more urgent the monitoring of the actual engagement of voucher beneficiaries in whatever learning process schools could implement. A prior implementation of PEAC’s ESC certification process would have offered some assurance that the government was not subsidizing phantom students.

PEAC proposed to DepEd a certification assessment instrument for the SHS voucher program in 2020. Perhaps, the furor caused by the country’s dismal performance in the Programme for International Student Assessment tests had become by then too big a distraction. DepEd has apparently not yet officially accredited the private schools it pays to participate in the voucher program. But, working with the accreditation bodies of the private education sector, PEAC used its instrument to launch in 2023 a voluntary certification process for private SHS.

The country still needs private school support to implement the SHS program. Perhaps, the current DepEd administration has enough time to mandate PEAC’s certification program to accredit participating private schools. This quality assurance measure should help banish the fear of ghost students.