State-based Education: Solving the Underfunding Problem of Public Education

Fight the underfunding of public education! 

State-based education in a Federal system of government provides a wide array of compelling reasons for change. Public education should be the sole concern of local governments not the national government. Why? For the following reasons:

1. Decentralizing public education has resulted in downsizing an overgrown and overstretched bureaucracy which is not very effective in responding to the specific demands of education in a particular locality. DepEd’s attention is mostly confined in urban areas where people are highly concentrated. This leaves all other regions underfunded and undermanned.

2. Devolving the power to allocate educational budget in the hands of the local government would allow them to experiment and innovate schooling techniques without being constrained by bureaucratic regulations from the top.

3. A state-based education system is better suited to develop the innate potential of the people in a particular locality. Each Federal state has specific demands for education that may not be true elsewhere. Educational policies should be developed along regional lines. It is only logical to make an education system tailored to a state's specific needs and demands.

4. Tackling the problem of bureaucratic corruption in education can be addressed more effectively and efficiently in the state level because of less red tape.

5. State-based education can be more inclusive to the cultural sensitivities to places of heterogeneous cultural mix. This makes assimilation of all peoples from different ethnic communities, cultural, and religious backgrounds more effective.