Substandard 3

In the social sciences, everything remains a hunch until you crunch the numbers.

As a social science teacher, I am a walking bag of hunches — with little time and even less aptitude to deal with the numbers that might prove or disprove these hunches. To deal with that, I occasionally organize seminars in the graduate school where I throw out a lot of hunches and ask graduate students to deal with the numbers to prove or disprove them.

Last semester, I offered a graduate seminar on Policy and State Capacity. In plain English, the seminar might be called Biting Off More than We Could Chew. More lyrically, we could quote an old Persian saying as an alternative course title: The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions.

What the seminar sought to accomplish was to demonstrate that quite a number of well-intentioned policies we adopted produced unintended calamities. This is because the policies did not adequately take into account the available state capacity to deliver the goals of a public policy.

Among the large number of policies we considered in this seminar concerns educational policy and the calamity this produced. I must credit my graduate student Hannah Frances C. Bodegon for working the numbers on this issue.

Here’s the hunch: the provision in the 1987 Constitution mandating free education to the secondary level resulted in stretching available state educational resources and therefore undermined educational quality.

Here are the numbers.

In 1986, when the Edsa Revolution happened, we had 808,099 students enrolled in public secondary schools. That was up from the 353,910 students in the public high schools a decade before that. This reflected the fantastic population growth rate we somehow sustained.

In 1988, after the provision in the Cory Constitution took effect, enrollment in public high schools spiked to 2,090,073! In only two years, the public educational system could have been properly refitted to deal with well over twice the number of students to be serviced.

In the Cory years, all the population management programs were basically scuttled. We will see the effect of that in the next paragraph.

By 2008, enrollment in public high schools had ballooned even further to 5,126,126! In two decades, the number of students to be serviced again more than doubled.

The sharp 1988 spike in public secondary school enrollment pushed up the total number of primary and secondary students the state had to educate. In 1973, total primary and secondary school enrollment was 6,955,419. In 1988, this jumped to 11,227,084. By 2008, the number of students in the public primary and secondary schools stood at 17,430,333. Those numbers look even more dramatic on a graph.

Of course, the nominal budget for basic education increased consistently year on year. But if we use constant pesos to take inflation into account, the results will be dismaying. For her paper, Bodegon used year 2000 pesos as constant.

In 1973, the real budget (using Y2000 pesos) was 23,119,200,000 (against a nominal budget of 1,140,000,000). In 1988, the real educational budget declined to 3,207,540,000. In 2008, the real educational budget stood at 9,212,041,800.

Real educational spending per capita is derived by dividing the real budget by the number of students to be served. If we do the math, startling numbers appear.

In 1973, real educational spending per capita was 3,324. That might not seem like much, but see what happens when public enrollment spiked. In 1988, after free secondary education became the norm, education spending per capita fell to 286! After much fiscal hustling to throw in more money for education, by 2008 the real per capita education budget was 528.

The really bad news is that not all of that pathetic amount goes to classroom. A substantial portion goes to support the burgeoning educational bureaucracy. A significant portion of that princely sum is also lost to corruption.

To make the information even more painful, my student went on to convert spending per student to dollars and produced a bar graph comparing Philippine educational spending to countries like Denmark, Korea and the US. Another bar graph showed per pupil spending in the advanced countries showing the cost for tertiary education to be much higher than primary and secondary education. Compare the DepEd’s budget with CHED’s and you get the idea.

Set all these numbers against the backdrop of hooligans at PUP torching scarce educational resources because they refuse to pay more than P12 per unit of university education and the whole thing becomes even more troubling. On the basis of the numbers alone, our public educational system ought to be declared in a state of calamity.

The framers of the 1987 Constitution might have the best of intentions. But they should have worked out the financial details of the deal, the fiscal implications of obeying constitutional mandate and the impact on the education market. Free public secondary education elbowed out private educational institutions and, as a result, substituted facsimile education for quality education.

The final result of the absence of a proper fit between policy and state capacity is utter disaster. What happened to Philippine education will require decades to repair.

That is not the whole of the bad news. In many other areas of policy, such as health care and agricultural subsidies, the incoherence between policy and actual state capacity is just as glaring. The outcomes are just as tragic.