A Counterintuitive Case of Privatization, School Choice, and Competition: Public-Private Partnerships in the Philippines

• In Event: 2020 Politics of Education Yearbook. School Choice Policy and Politics Around the Globe: Sociological Contributions

Abstract

Due to limited public-sector funding, low-income countries have turned to public-private partnerships (PPPs) as a promising strategy for extending access to education, but especially to students located in slums, where governments often do not provide schools (Heyneman, Stern, & Smith, 2011). Research has begun to emerge in response to this trend (Day Ashley et al., 2015; Srivastava, 2013), but there are still significant gaps. One gap relates to PPPs in the Philippines, where nine percent of secondary students attend a private high school, thanks to the government’s Education Service Contracting (ESC) program, which offers to “poor but deserving” students a voucher that provides 55 percent of the cost of an average private school (Baum, 2012). This paper’s general objective is to highlight two important-yet-ignored aspects of this program: (a) the strategic, supply-side activity of private schools as they have entered the market to take advantage of this voucher program and (b) the demand-side rationalities that guide parental decision-making, particularly in marginalized contexts.

Theoretically, we draw on sociological approaches to understanding supply- and demand-side dynamics in local education spaces (Ball, 2003; van Zanten, 2009) and the ways they can constitute “lived markets” (Taylor, 2001). These approaches underscore that market strategies and school choice processes are complex and iterative, with embedded rationalities guided not only by policy stipulations but also by the interaction of material and socially-constructed factors.

Methodologically, the results are based on a case study with two rounds of data collection (October 2015, January-February 2016) in one slum area of Manila chosen for its population density and concentration of private schools. Data collection entailed interviews with 23 principals, 63 teachers, and 96 parents from both private schools (n=5) and nearby public schools (n=10) as well as a review of policy documents and interviews with relevant government officials.

Through an investigation of families’ school choice patterns and schools’ logics of action in educational quasi-markets, this paper highlights counter-intuitive results. Paradoxically, despite the pro-market and pro-PPP impetus of the Philippines’ government, the privatization of school provision in the Philippines is diminishing, and the schools receiving the voucher are becoming increasingly unaffordable for the poor families to whom the voucher was initially targeted. In parallel, the voucher has generated different patterns of school choice and different responses on behalf of schools, which have led to increasing levels of school segregation and stratification.

Empirically, this study is valuable because it is the first to examine the assumed mechanisms (of choice and competition) of this PPP policy in the Philippines. Theoretically, this study is valuable because it contributes to the growing literature on the perspectives and logics that guide the behavior of families and schools in education markets.

Authors

• D. Brent Edwards Jr., University of Hawaii - Manoa

• Andreu Termes

• Antoni Verger, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona