007 EQUITY V. QUALITY (1)
I’ve come to be amused and annoyed at the same time when people talk about providing quality education equitably. For a third world nation like the Philippines, it just won’t happen. At least, not in this lifetime.
Despite the enormous budget the education department has been getting in recent years, it’ll never be enough.
For the longest time, the education department has focused on providing resources to public schools equitably. Rightly so.
In the case of classrooms, for instance, priority is given to communities with no schools or with the highest demand for schools and classrooms. The only way a community should get classrooms they don’t really need is when their local government or a private donor spends for it. The national government wouldn’t—or shouldn’t—prioritize them over communities with a higher demand.
The same is true with other school resources—chairs, computers, teachers, textbooks and everything else.
Equity, in the Philippines, precedes quality. Except, of course, if we succumb to the practice of simply assuming that quality already exists (PISA, TIMSS and other objective measures would tell us otherwise).
Perhaps you haven’t noticed it, but you probably encountered statements and reports that simply append the term “quality” to “education” (or “educational services”), as if quality is something that we can already assume to exist simply because there is a school, there are teachers, textbooks, computers and the like.
We should not make that assumption. And the education department must realize that the only way we can see outstanding school performance—quality education—is if we allow schools to chart their own path to quality.
This, of course, is yet another reason why true school based management should become culture in Philippine public schools.
For as long as education spending remains below acceptable standards, we can never expect to provide all public schools with the resources that they really need to excel. This means bringing the education budget to more acceptable levels—20% of the national budget compared to the current 13-14%; 5-10% of the GDP as is the level of our ASEAN neighbors, compared to our current 3%.
Until then, the national government will be preoccupied with equity issues for God knows how long. It should therefore just let schools and their respective local communities work on coming up with the quality reforms, independently.
It is through this self-determination—coupled with their sense of innovation and the support of stakeholders in their community—that will enable them to be truly empowered to excel.
Otherwise, the words “quality” and “excellence” in education would just be that. Words.
(To be continued)