Use school vouchers TO MITIGATE SHORTAGES

AMONG the accomplishments of the outgoing administration is the doubling of the budget for education.

When President Gloria M. Arroyo took office in 2001, the budget for state colleges, the Department of Education (DepEd), Commission on Higher Education (CHED), and Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (Tesda) was only P90 billion. This year the budget for these educational agencies is P180 billion.

Up to February 2010, according to the President herself, the government, since 2001, has built 100,000 school buildings, hired 60,000 teachers, and increased their monthly salary from P9, 000 to P14,000 a month. It has also allocated P1.5 billion for teacher’s training in English proficiency. She said that mainly because of improvements in the educational system, our students’ test scores in the last four years have risen from 44 percent to 65 percent in elementary schools and 36 percent to 47 percent in secondary schools. The conditional cash transfer program and other programs of the DepEd and the Department of Social Welfare and Development have raised school participation rates impressively.

The President herself, however, also says that very much more must be done for us, basic education-wise, to reach the level of the best countries.

Shortages of education resources

The Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) has been consistently critical of the Arroyo Administration.

When the new schoolyear was about to open, ACT’s national chairman said in a statement that President Arroyo will leave a huge problem of shortages in education resources to her successor.

ACT chair Antonio Tinio’s statement said the Arroyo administration after nine years in office has utterly failed to eliminate shortages of teachers, classrooms, textbooks, sinks and toilets and other critical resources in our public schools.

Tinio said that school year 2010 to 2011 suffers a shortage of 54,060 teachers, 4,538 principals, and 6,473 head teachers; 61,343 classrooms, 816,291 seats, and 113,051 water and sanitation facilities. The DepEd will also need an additional P400 million to address the textbook shortage. So that the total amount DepEd will need to cover “all of these resource gaps” is P91.54 billion.

He acknowledged that the administration has been hiring 10,000 teachers and constructing some 3,000 classrooms annually. “However, these efforts are not enough compared to the sheer size of our enrolment. As a result, public school education in the Arroyo years is characterized by oversized classes with 60 or more students, contributing to a further decline in the quality of education,” Tinio said. We have in fact observed that in some schools there are classes with as much as 80 pupils.

We agree with ACT that President-elect Noynoy Aquino should include eliminating these shortages among his priorities.

But our solution is not to saddle the DepEd with accelerated hiring and classroom- and toilet-building programs.

Our suggestion is to do something quick to decongest our public schools and offer some of the children a much better school environment, better textbooks and perhaps better-managed schools—in the private sector.

We recommend the expansion of the Education Voucher System, which is already one of the DepEd’s relatively successful programs.

DepEd’s school voucher system

First, what are education or school vouchers?

Many countries use the school voucher system to solve problems like ours—solving congestion and shortages and helping poor children get a better education than what they could get in the free public school.

But in the United States the school voucher has also been used to address the problem of tax-payer parents unhappy with the quality of the education and the moral social upbringing their children get in government-run schools.

These parents have a valid complaint. Their taxes support the public schools which give their children a kind of education and a school experience that violate their sense of excellence, or notion of morality, or their religious faith. It is only just and fair for them to get back the money they pay to the government (as part of their taxes) for the education of their children. They can then use that money to buy the education and school atmosphere they prefer in a private school.

Most of the time, in America, the parents have to add to the voucher amount to finance the entire cost of their children’s private school enrolment. Still, that’s a lot better than paying for the whole tuition while at the same time paying a large sum to support government schools their children are not using.

DepEd’s GASTPE program

The DepEd’s Government Assistance to Students and Teachers in Private Education (GASTPE) already serves to decongest our high schools by supporting poor but deserving students to enroll in private high schools. This is carried out through the Education Voucher System and Education Service Contracting.

The voucher is for tuition fee subsidies of P10,000 for those in the National Capital Region (NCR) and P5,000 for those outside NCR. The money is paid directly to the private school.

The government spends some P4 billion to subsidize 700,000 beneficiaries.

Instead of spending P91.4 billion in building new classrooms, hiring more teachers and principals for our public schools, why not spend a goodly part of this money for vouchers for more student beneficiaries. At P4 billion for 700,000 beneficiaries, P40 billion will fund seven million students’ transfer to private schools.
This means removing almost 1/3 of the 24 million public school population. Which in turn means the existing public-school facilities, teachers and principals will more or less suffice for the remaining 16 to 17 million pupils left in the public schools.

This method would also remove the corruption that we are sure attends the classroom-building program.

This school voucher system could even be combined with a program to attract the participation of domestic and foreign philanthropic individuals and institutions. –Manila Times