(Continued from April 22, 2021)
FOR SO MANY decades now, the officials of the Department of Education (DepEd) have always been saying that they are lacking teachers, classrooms and textbooks. Since we are now considering a shift to the federal system, these shortages should already be met as soon as possible.
I really wonder why these shortages would still exist, despite the fact that the DepEd always gets the biggest budgetary allocation every year, as provided for in the Constitution.
The question now is what would happen if the education function is fully devolved as part of the new federal system.
As I see it however, the DEPED should review the economics of their present methods, so that the problems of their system will not be passed on to the future states.
Generally speaking, we could actually say that when all of the powers are finally devolved to the future states, the problems and defects of the old systems should no longer be part of the devolution to the future states.
Since it will take some time before the complete process of federalism will finally happen, we should take advantage of the time in between to fix the present problems, so to speak.
As I understand it, the prospective devolution of authorities to the future states will include most of the national functions except foreign affairs, national defense, central banking and finance.
As I see it, there are three levels of government functions and these are policies, programs and projects. There are many ways of understanding this dichotomy, but I would usually explain it by saying that objectives should be translated into policies, programs should be based on programs and projects should be based on programs.
In other words, everything should be derived from policies, everything should be programmatic and everything should be project based. In the language of the government, a project should have a beginning and an end, and rightly so. Having said these, the next question now is how these levels would be distributed when federalism happens.
Based on common sense, we could right away say that the federal government should limit itself to policies and programs, and should no longer go down to the level of projects. Logically, we could expect the states to implement their own localized policies and programs, but only these states should be allowed to implement their own projects.
As a way of saying that the federal government should put their money where their mouth is, it should be ready to propose programs that could be translated into projects that are federally financed.
Health and education are two of the government functions that could easily be disrupted towards the common good and this could be done by using information and communications technologies (ICT) hat are already readily available. For example, the government could promote telemedicine and online learning.
One good thing about this approach is that there is no need to build a separate infrastructure for each and every government function, because the ICT infrastructure that will be used for health could also be used for education. As a matter of fact, the same infrastructure could also be used to deliver justice, employment, livelihood and shelter, among other public services./PN
