Education bargains

In 2026, education received 4 percent of gross domestic product, its biggest budget ever. Department of Education’s (DepEd) take, estimated at P1.05 trillion and 75 percent of the total, gives it a nominal increase about 11 times its 2000 budget. With the burden of deciding best use of bigger funds, DepEd has Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel (GEEAP) research on education’s “Best Buys.”

Convened in 2020 by multilateral development agencies, GEEAP seeks policy initiatives showing the greatest learning results. In 2023, it described Best Buys as those that produced clear improvements at scale on crucial learning issues and their costs. Repeated evidence of low effectiveness and high costs marked the Bad Buys. In between Best and Bad were investments judged Good, Effective, or Promising based on their levels of learning effectiveness against their expense.

Emerging Philippine research supports GEEAP’s Best Buys: 1) quality early childhood education; 2) structured pedagogy; 3) teaching at the right level; 4) targeted remedial instruction; 5) coaching instead of in-service training for teachers. DepEd’s Academic Recovery and Accessible Learning law and early learning remediation aligns with GEEAP principles. So does extending the voucher system to the primary grades to use surplus private school seats and relieve DepEd classroom congestion. Improving the learning environment may also help reduce remediation needs.

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GEEAP warns against investments on stand-alone solutions, such as hardware-heavy educational technology (EdTech), additional textbooks or teachers, and across-the-board pay increases unlinked to learning improvements. Costly individual investments, they often fail to expected benefits. Missing essential, complementary investments diminish their effectiveness and impact.

Without sufficient, stable power and internet connections, computers prove frustrating tools. Similarly, textbooks must be relevant, accurate, and accessible to the children for whom they are intended. Teachers are invaluable assets, if they have the requisite content knowledge and the language, communication, and pedagogical skills. The absence of these preconditions has doomed otherwise laudable policies.

Learning from local and international experience, DepEd is shifting from individual purchases of EdTech devices and low-earth-orbit connectivity for integrated systems solutions packaged with private sector help. It also had to adapt GEEAP’s cost-benefit approach to the historical and political context in which it must operate. Much of the DepEd funding goes to mandated items, like pay for its roughly one million plantilla. Personnel services ate up about 90 percent of DepEd’s budget in 2000 and still account for around 75 percent today.

DepEd must also deal with the damage done over decades of malfeasance or misguided priorities. Take the classroom backlog, estimated at over 225,000 units, with structures already condemned or facing demolition added to the estimated shortage of 165,000 classrooms. DepEd secretaries must account for their individual responses to this chronic problem, though the failure is collective and extends beyond one department. Accountability must ascend to higher levels of authority. But the public sees the accumulated baggage as mainly due to DepEd management.

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Throwing money at the problem must be an option, but investments in classrooms rank poorly, if measured only on evidence of learning gains per peso. But these can arguably arrest further decline in the health of students and the quality of their educational experience, which conditions of congested, multigrade classrooms, and multiple shifts progressively degrade. These benefits add value to a theoretically inferior Buy, but is popular with the public and the politicians. Classrooms are visible, quantifiable, easily identified with their benefactors. They bank “utang na loob” credits collectible from grateful beneficiaries for future transactions, such as in elections.

Investing in Smart Buys must remain the government’s guiding principle. Classrooms must meet DepEd specifications; designed to protect the health and safety of students, but not overly engineered with possibly unnecessary features that drive up costs and whose use of materials is difficult to monitor. Projects must be clear of right-of-way complications, properly costed, assured timely funding, and constructed where most needed. Necessary conditions, but not so easy to establish because they involve both technical issues and political interests. They will require complementary investments in DepEd systems for data gathering, project preparation, procurement, monitoring and evaluation, and public communications.

DepEd must prove that politically smart buys can also meet GEEAP’s cost-benefit metrics. The proof cannot come just from increased spending on standard educational resources, but from evidence that higher expenditures result in better student learning.

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Edilberto C. de Jesus is professor emeritus at the Asian Institute of Management.

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