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Leyes y políticas nacionales sobre derechos de escolaridad o enseñanza gratuita – Philippines

Importa si el Estado facilita la enseñanza gratuitamente o si cobra derechos de enseñanza. Todos los Estados del mundo han firmado por lo menos un tratado internacional que les obliga a hacer que la enseñanza primaria sea gratuita y obligatoria y que la educación secundaria llegue a serlo progresivamente. Pero la educación no puede ser obligatoria si no es gratuita también y esta contradicción suele ser ignorada con demasiada frecuencia. Además, ¿qué significa realmente la enseñanza gratuita en un mundo lleno de costos evidentes y ocultos para los estudiantes, los padres y las comunidades locales? Según los resultados de una encuesta realizada por Katarina Tomasevski en 2006, la enseñanza no era realmente gratuita en la gran mayoría de los países del mundo. La información que figura a continuación sobre su país, fue sacada de este importantísimo estudio.

 

Las leyes y políticas nacionales son las aplicaciones de la constitución, aunque pueden ser más avanzadas, porque son examinadas y elaboradas de nuevo con más frecuencia. Las leyes son hechas por el gobierno, los parlamentarios y los burócratas, a menudo en consulta con la sociedad civil. No obstante, esto también las expone a la vulnerabilidad y el retroceso, pues pueden convertirse en instrumentos de la política y las prioridades a corto plazo. Las leyes y las políticas son accesibles al cambio y la influencia por medio del proceso democrático y las campañas de la sociedad civil. Y sus violaciones deben, si es posible, ser impugnadas en los tribunales o mediante la revisión judicial.

 

 

 

 

El Estado es el actor principal en cualquier reclamo del derecho a la educación, es el principal detentor de obligaciones, el principal ejecutor, es el garante, la firma respecto a las normas internacionales que lo obligan a respetar, proteger y realizar el derecho a la educación. El Estado debe, por lo tanto, ser juzgado o cuestionado sobre la base de su texto principal sobre el derecho a la educación, sea éste la constitución, las leyes o las políticas.

The Constitution of the Philippines obliges the government to ensure that both primary and lower secondary education are free but this has not been translated into governmental policy or into reality. The Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) noted in 2005 that primary education was not universalized because it was not available throughout the country. It acknowledged difficulties in ensuring schooling for children dispersed among 7,000 islands but emphasised that education was not universalized because it was not made free. Families bear the cost of “meals, transportation, school uniforms and supplies” and in many schools no enrolment and tuition charges are also levied. An important reason for transferring so much of the cost of education to the family budget is "a chronic budget deficit caused by spiralling demands on an unreformed and hopelessly inadequate revenue base".

An NGO ‘School Report’ has faulted the Philippines for failing to eliminate ‘user fees’ (in the language of the World Bank), which impede universalization of education.

 Internal problems are not the only cause of the government’s inability to ensure free and compulsory education for all children. Conflicts in the allocation of limited resources between debt repayment and education have led to human rights litigation. A group of senators challenged in 1991 the constitutionality of the budgetary allocation of P86 billion for debt servicing which compared to P27 billion for education. The 1986 Constitution of the Philippines obligates the government to assign the highest budgetary priority to education. It obliges the state to provide free public education in the elementary and high school levels and to “assign the highest budgetary priority to education.” The issue to be decided was whether debt servicing, exceeding three times the budgetary allocation for education, was unconstitutional. The Court has found that education obtained the largest allocation amongst all the government departments, as the Constitution required, while debt servicing was necessary for the creditworthiness of the country and, thus, the survival of its economy.

 The economy has survived thus far but the government’s inability to distribute the costs of that survival fairly in the population has encountered many challenges. The Philippine Commission on Human Rights has defined disadvantaged sectors as ‘women, children, youth, prisoners/detainees, urban poor, indigenous people, elderly, Muslims, persons with disabilities, internally displaced persons, informal labour, private labour, migrant workers, rural workers and public sector’. The inclusion of the whole public sector amongst the disadvantaged epitomizes the model chosen to ensure the survival of the economy. This includes teachers, whose inadequate salaries are a bottleneck for improving both outreach and quality of education.

 There is no governmental policy to ensure free primary education. Charges for enrolment and tuition, those for uniforms, shoes, supplies, and transport, and the cost of textbooks place education beyond the reach of most of these disadvantaged sectors. An additional obstacle is the lack of birth registration. Children without it exist neither legally nor statistically. Birth registration is not free of charge, adding yes another financial barrier for the poor. That financial obstacle is compounded by charges levied in public school, which should be but is not free.