Ghosts in education

Classes will open this Monday with the usual problems across the country: lack of school buildings, classrooms, teachers, school supplies. In areas of conflict in Mindanao, classes may have to be postponed indefinitely, according to education officials. But even without the conflict, quality education is a problem in Mindanao, as in the rest of the country. Among the executive departments, education gets the biggest chunk of the national budget, as mandated by the Constitution. Yet the funding is never enough, and a tight budget is one of the reasons often cited for the deteriorating quality of Philippine education.

The nation must worry not only about budgetary constraints but also a misallocation of funding. Earlier this week, a congressman disclosed that the Department of Education, Culture and Sports could be losing close to P5 billion a year in salary payments to non-existent or ghost public school teachers. DECS officials may also be bloating enrollment figures, the congressman said.

Think of what P5 billion can do in a cash-strapped education system. It can build classrooms, hire qualified teachers, produce quality textbooks. The quality of Philippine education has deteriorated so much that Filipinos are losing their competitive edge in the labor market. In the global information economy, providing world-class education is crucial for a nation's survival. Yet whatever improvements have been made in the education system in recent years have hardly been felt. The failure of the system is manifested in the quality of graduates churned out by many professional schools. A distressingly high percentage of these graduates never pass their professions' licensure examinations.

Many of these schools are private institutions, but supervising them is also the job of the government. How can education agencies do their job properly when they are squandering public funds on non-existent personnel? The government must look closely at this problem and make sure precious funds for education are utilized judiciously. Whether it's corruption or plain incompetence, the existence of "ghost" teachers does not bode well for the state of Philippine education.