Problem Solving the Philippines: Education facts

By giancarloangulo on July 18, 2024

by Giancarlo Angulo

I will try to up my involvement in writing about the Philippines. Before we can start to problem solve we have to first gather the facts. As a follow up to joe's post

As Ireneo routinely tells me that the people that should be most concerned are the people here like me, joe, and karl. The people who are living here and whose lives or love ones are directly affected.

Sorry if my personal biases shine through.

But the Philippines has been overtaken by bureaucrats and this is also probably because of how we educate our children and what they see present in our society.

Some links share by JP are linked below:

https://thediplomat.com/2023/02/the-philippines-basic-education-crisis/

https://www.gmanetwork.com/news/topstories/nation/887851/deped-lacks-nearly-90-000-teachers-pia-cayetano/story/

What all of these analysis have in common is that they are working within the constraints of our current thinking but also working beyond the constraints of our current resources.

What do I mean. We will never have enough resources and doing the simple computation of 30 students per teacher ratio would never make sense unless our population is no longer growing at a healthy rate. And if it is no longer growing then we are already dying as a nation so we do not want degrowth.

We do not have the option of throwing money at the problem. We need creativity. We need targeted spending.

But before we can target let us see the resources we are currently giving this problem.

DepEd Annual Audit Report 2022 Highlights

These are 2022 figures from the COA Annual Audit report on the Department of Education as the 2023 audit report is still not uploaded in the main site if it is already available.

Start with the DepEd structure is composed of Central Offices and Field Offices

What about the profile of the education department?

How does the department rate itself based on targets it set?

What are the financial highlights based on the audit of COA?

Budget 101

The budgets of Government Agencies has 3 main components. These are CO, MOOE, and PS.

Capital Outlay (CO) is investment and is usually composed of buildings and equipment procured by the government agency.

Maintenance and Other Operating Expenses (MOOE) cover operating expenses of the agency that is not related to salaries of Plantilla personnel. This includes utilities, cleaning agency services, security agency services,

Personnel Services (PS) cover the benefits and salaries of Plantilla Personnel.

An explainer for the budgeting for the Philippine government can be found here: Philippine budget process: Everything you need to know (rappler.com)

What are ways we can think about these numbers?

These are simple measures that give us an idea how we can think about these figures.

If we divide the number of teaching personnel with the number of learners we get the figure around 27.
From this website (https://www.oecd.org/en/topics/class-size-and-student-teacher-ratios.html) the OECD average is 15 students to 1 teacher. Studying in a science highschool the class sizes we had ranged from 24 to 32 if I remember correctly as we had around 224 students for 8 sections.
Comparing against ASEAN countries for 2019 data from this report (https://www.aseanstats.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/ASEAN_Key_Figures_2019_Rev1.pdf)

By percentage PS at 81 percent, MOOE at 16 percent, and CO at 3 percent.

Based on the two simple computations above we can say that operationally to excluding the infrastructure needed we need to double the budget of PS and MOOE to be in line with OECD averages and even ASEAN 6 averages (around below 20).
Based on the 2022 yearend Basic Education Report (https://www.deped.gov.ph/wp-content/uploads/Major-Programs-Projects-and-Activities-Status-of-Implementation-FY-2022.pdf)

From the DepEd Basic Education Report

With average occupancy of 15 per classroom at half day which means 30 per day.
15.6 B divide by 6379 classrooms means 2.445M per classroom. Assumption is this includes furniture and other fixtures.
This is from the speech of VP Sara as DepEd Secretary:

This is the Basic Education Report 2023. [School Facilities and Learning Resources] The lack of school infrastructure and resources to support the ideal teaching process is the most pressing issue pounding the Philippine basic education. The Department is not blind to the reality that there is a need to build, repair, and maintain school infrastructures to accommodate the growing number of learners all over the Philippines. Today, there are over 28 million Filipino learners studying in public schools all over the Philippines. Our latest inventory shows we have 327,851 school buildings in the country. Out of these school buildings, only 104,536 are in good condition.

Due to various reasons, there are also 100,072 school buildings that need minor repairs; 89,252 require major repairs, and 21,727 are set for condemnation. Our schools are not calamity-proof. Among the significant roadblocks to our education infrastructure program are earthquakes, typhoons, landslides, flooding, and even armed conflicts.

https://www.ovp.gov.ph/post/basic-education-report-2023-speech

Classroom shortage from this article is pegged at 167,901 classrooms requiring 420B.

Using the 2.45 M figure above what we get is around 411 billion. The figures are not that far from each other so we need about half a trillion if we factor in inflation and others.

https://www.philstar.com/headlines/2023/01/30/2241298/commissioned-poll-lack-classrooms-must-be-depeds-top-priority-filipinos-say

To summarize:

If we target a decent 15:1 Student Teacher Ratio, we would need to double MOOE and PS of the department which would mean a 1.14 Trillion budget for MOOE and PS. This is about 190M MOOE and 950 M for PS. The MOOE doubling is very conservative as additional classrooms would mean additional MOOE expense.

If we target that ratio the current deficit of classrooms would exacerbate. The current shortage is pegged at around 167,901 at the end of 2022. This would mean around 420B to 500B investment. At the current spend of 15B this would mean 28 to 33 years.

I will end this here as this posts has too many links already. Something I keep on telling Karl to minimize, I will have to take my own advice and write about some options we can try.