008 Equity V. Quality (2)
Two of the best schools in the country are actually public schools—Philippine Science High School and the Philippine High School for the Arts.
What makes them special? Well, for sure, a lot of it has to do with the enormous resources provided these schools. They can spend more on their facilities, their faculty, their libraries and laboratories, and everything else. Students are provided dormitories, and get this, monthly stipends.
It must be noted that these schools are not even managed by the education department, but by the Department of Science and Technology and the National Commission for Culture and Arts (although the education secretary sits as co-chair of these schools, this function is mostly ministerial).
There are specialized public schools supervised by the education department, including city-funded science high schools, sports- and arts-oriented schools, and tech-voc high schools, but the better ones rely mostly on local funding, mainly from their respective local governments.
It would be difficult for the education department to spend on state of the art facilities or equipment on one school since there are over 45,000 others that lack the most basic of facilities and equipment. It’ll be hard to justify this not-so-equitable distribution of government resources.
Equity, as I said, takes precedence over quality, especially as far as the education department is concerned. There’s always that school somewhere with a condemned building that needs a new one, there’s another that requires a fence, still another requires replacements for textbooks damaged by a storm.
The only way a public school can afford to provide laptops or tablets for each student is if these are procured by the local government or by a private donor.
We therefore expect more quality from them, precisely because they’ve overcome the equity barrier that has limited most public schools.
Because they’ve been fortunate enough to be given these “quality” resources, these schools should challenge themselves to be as good if not better than Philippine Science or PHSA, or even the best private schools in the country, if not the entire world.
This requires two critical elements. The first is self-determination. The second is innovation. Even without the deep pockets, I believe schools can still excel with just these two.
For the others, the underfunded majority of public schools that have to satisfy themselves with their limited MOOE allocations, the same actually applies—if not even more so.
They need to define their own path (self-determination) and they need to come up with creative solutions (innovation) so that they too can excel despite their limited resources.
I think it can be done—by most schools. They just need to be open to accept the challenge and be able to apply themselves to doing things differently.