Funds from flood to education

Over 5.1 million of the 24 million in basic education are “aisle learners.” These are enrolled students whose numbers exceed Department of Education ratios for required resources—mainly classrooms. Aisle students arise from a problem as old and as obvious as corruption in the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH): the government’s failure to provide enough classrooms for children. The scale and speed at which Congress supports DepEd’s efforts to deal with it will determine how many more generations of Filipino children will suffer the fate of aisle learners.

DepEd faces a supply gap of 165,000 classrooms. The Commission on Audit (COA) confirmed that former DepEd secretary Sara Duterte completed 192 classrooms in 2023. Halfway through his term, Secretary Sonny Angara’s 2025 pipeline only projects 6,000 new classrooms. The Angara Team has now turned to a 40-year advocacy of education stakeholders: government subsidy for children crowded out of public elementary education to attend private schools. It had initially set P6 billion for this program, a measly sum against the hundreds of billions casually dumped by Congress to DPWH for flood control.

Can’t Congress find more funds? DepEd already has a working template in the Education Service Contracting (ESC) program, administered since 1989 by the Private Education Assistance Committee in junior high school (JHS) and the Senior High School Voucher Program (SHSVP), added to the PEAC portfolio in 2013. These remain our longest and most successful examples of public-private complementarity (PPC), the policy approach that all stakeholders support.

Recent reviews of the voucher program confirm its effective implementation of PPC. By 2025, ESC had enrolled nearly 900,000 students, about 11.5 percent of JHS students and over 1.3 million SHS students, nearly a third of SHS enrollment. Vouchers also meet the cost-effectiveness test. On a per-student basis, more than half of ESC schools and over 80 percent of SHSPV schools charged tuition and other school fees below government costs. A 2011 World Bank study estimated the ESC subsidy at only 58 percent of DepEd costs. A 2018 study for PEAC reported SHSVP savings ranging from 33 to 48 percent of government provision.

Some 12,000 private K-6 schools can offer DepEd children classroom seats. DepEd competition, pandemic disruptions, and rising costs dropped their average enrollment from 165 in 2012-13 to 86 in 2020-21. Estimates of their capacity to accept DepEd aisle learners range from 433,000 to 867,000 students, representing between 28 to 56 percent of the aisle population. Their transfer to private schools would reduce demand for DepEd classrooms by 22,000 to 43,000.

The numbers need further validation and refining. But not the magnitude and urgency of the classroom backlog. Nor is the effectiveness of the voucher program disputed, evidenced by a performance record of nearly 40 years supported by external evaluation. Neither the ability nor the willingness of the private K-6 schools to participate in this PPC is an issue. The K-6 voucher plan seems a no-brainer.

Resistance to its adoption may instead spring from the good intentions of legislators. Mission creep is the danger. Access is only one goal of education. Congress must rightly consider quality and equity factors. The risk in the crafting of legislation lies in a good plan being burdened with additional good objectives, complicating its execution. Competing goals, unbalanced fund allocation among them, and debatable performance measures make successful implementation and subsequent assessment more difficult

Quality and equity are longer-term goals, with success measures more open to dispute. As the explicit driver of both ESC and SHSVP, access has provided the clearest indicator of performance. It serves as the trump card, not sufficient but indispensable. Before improvements in learning equity and quality, children must first find admission to a classroom. Learning is a cumulative process. Our education problems begin at the K-6 level. It makes sense to invest resources to avoid problems at the source. A measure clearly meeting one goal should not be discounted because it only imperfectly addresses other objectives.

Still, studies of the voucher system should reassure legislators that it also favorably affects equity and quality. They show that the majority of voucher beneficiaries belong to the lower economic sectors, if not to the poorest of the poor. Vouchers give parents a measure of choice in selecting schools for their children. They find no evidence that parental decisions to move their children to private schools lead to a decline in learning quality. International tests actually show that private school children record slightly better scores.

But even the access problem will take time to fix. Here, the budget is an issue. How much time before aisle children get relief will greatly depend on the budget Congress allows. As in flood control funding, congressmen and senators own the budget decision.