A voucher system for private schools

As schools open in the next two weeks, a serious problem will dawn upon us other than the usual mess involving shortage of classrooms, teachers and textbooks. I was told that there is this growing imbalance in the enrollment in public and private schools. The economic conditions have forced many private school students to go public.

As if that were not bad enough, private school teachers have also migrated to the public schools due to higher pay and benefits. Private schools are unable to hold on to their best teachers due to decreased ability to compensate them properly. If the trend is not arrested, the government will find itself unable to cope with the physical demands of increased enrollment.

Having been a product of a Catholic parochial school, the nation’s largest (in my elementary years before I moved to the state university system), I appreciate the role private schools play. In today’s economic squeeze, it is the private schools that cater to middle and lower income groups that suffer. The Ateneos and the La Salles will continue to prosper for no other reason than the ability of upper income groups to absorb the increased cost of tuition year in and year out.

We now find our public schools saddled with as much as 60 to 80 students in a classroom. For some, they have to make do with the shade under a mango tree. On the other hand, some private schools may start to find their classrooms near empty or without the usual complement of competent teachers. I don’t know if DepEd officials see the problem and see it worsening as we go on.

The quick solution here is to adopt a voucher system where a student who has enrolled in a public school but cannot be accommodated can be given a government voucher to study in the nearest private school instead. This is being done to some extent in the United States and I seem to recall that it was tried out here on a limited basis. Or maybe, the more expensive schools can also be required to take in a number of voucher paying students.

I understand that the problem encountered with the voucher system is the inability of government to quickly pay the private schools. The credit of the Philippine government may be good (based on the popularity of Treasury Bills) but the private schools cannot use vouchers to pay teachers or even taxes (for schools that are clearly for profit).

This is, however, not a problem without a quick solution if the bureaucracy can just get together with a mind to solve it. Maybe vouchers could be converted into a government bond that is easily traded in the secondary market.

It is saying. I mean, the private schools have the physical requirements to provide a good education like classrooms and laboratories. What they are losing now are students. The public schools are overflowing with students, but don’t have enough facilities. From a total country perspective, we are wasting underutilized resources that the private schools already have. And we don’t have the finances to build new ones to accommodate the overflow in public school enrollment.

The solution seems simple to me. A more liquid voucher system should be able to see us through the next few years as we look for longer term solutions to the overwhelming problems we have in education. It would be a pity if the private schools that have served the middle and lower income classes for so long would be forced to close down. That would only make government’s problems in education worse, to the detriment of our future generations.

Drug tests

Still on education, that proposal for a universal mandatory drug testing for students smells to me as another get rich quick racket of the same suspects who got the LTO to mandate that too for drivers. While the drug problem is no small matter, we are not about to address it well by these mandatory mass testing.

In the first place, we don’t have a comprehensive drug rehab plan in place that will take care of those found to be positive. What do we do once a child is found positive? What if a whole mass of them turns out positive? I am afraid the children’s future could only be compromised, specially in cases of false positives. Most likely, these poor children could be thrown out of school for at least a year. In the absence of a program, that could only make things worse because the child will have all that idle time to indulge the habit or ironically enough, develop it.

The other question is, who pays for the test? Government doesn’t even have enough funds to build classrooms and buy textbooks. How can it have funds to pay for drug tests? If they make parents foot the bill, that would be an added burden on top of the already high cost of education these days. Surely, they must have figured all these before they started being serious with this proposal.

This kempetai approach to the drug problem is simply doomed to failure. But I have no doubt, selling all these drug test kits will make some people very rich. At P300 per test times millions of students… Dassalot of money! Even the PNP reports it needs P34 million to drug test all 100,000 policemen and it does not have the funds. PNP Chief Hermogenes Ebdane says they will make do with random testing.

Ay naku! That’s the problem with some of us. The most sinister motives are clothed with motherhood goodness. But in the end, they betray corruption at the core!

The Church

With all the problems faced by the Church today, the case of Bishop Bacani is the least of its worries. Direct from Texas, Dr. Ernie E tells us why.

There were three country churches in a small Texas town: the Presbyterian church, the Methodist church and the Catholic church. Each church was virtually overrun with pesky squirrels.

One day, the Presbyterian church called a meeting to decide what to do about the squirrels. After much prayer and consideration they determined that the squirrels were predestined to be there and the church shouldn’t interfere with God’s divine will.

The Methodist group got together and decided that they were not in a position to harm any of God’s creations, so they humanely trapped the squirrels and set them free a few miles outside of town. Three days later, the squirrels were back.

It was only the Catholics who were able to come up with the best and most effective solution. They baptized the squirrels and registered them as members of the church. Now they only see them on Christmas and Easter.

Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is [email protected]