The election campaign has led to the call for free education for students attending secondary schools, i.e., the full payment of tuition fees by the State.

THE CURRENT election campaign in Jamaica has put education on the agenda. To be more precise, the campaign has put the question of whether parents and/or guardians should contribute towards the tuition of their children at the secondary level.

This important election issue is reminiscent of a main issue behind the recent presidential election in the US. Using the slogan "no child left behind," George W. Bush campaigned on the use of vouchers as a way for families to send their children to better performing schools, rather than the poorly performing public schools. Even though the current "Free Education" proposal in Jamaica and the so called "voucher" programme in the US may seem very different on the surface, in one most important aspect they are very much similar. At this juncture, it may be worthwhile to closely examine what the free education proposal truly entails.

Let us begin by stating some facts.

The major items on the 2002/03 budget of the Government of Jamaica are: Debt service 64 per cent (this item accounted for 67.2 per cent of the revised budget in 2001/02); Education 10 per cent (28 per cent of the non-debt budget); National Security 6.3 per cent (17.6 per cent of the non-debt budget) and Health 4 per cent (11 per cent of the non-debt budget). It may be worth pointing out that debt service simply represents expenditure, which the country undertook in the past, which is now being paid for.

The enrolment rate in the Jamaican secondary school system (grades 7 to 11) during 2000/01 was 79 per cent. The enrolment rate for secondary schools is measured by taking the number of student registered in secondary schools and dividing by the number of persons in the population who fall within the secondary school age. Enrolment for Grades 7 to 9 was 95.3 per cent while enrolment for grades 10 to 11 was 76.7 per cent. There are some schools that terminate at grade 9 and therefore do not have grades 10 and 11. The enrolment level at the primary level was 99.1 per cent. Average daily attendance in the secondary school system was 85.4 per cent while attendance was 82.9 per cent at the primary level.

For comparison, the secondary enrolment rates for select countries are presented below (based on data available to the writer at the time of writing). Enrolment rates during 1997: Argentina 73.3 per cent; Brazil 61.5 per cent; Costa Rica 48.4 per cent; Dominican Republic 53.9 per cent; Guyana 73.5 per cent. For the Bahamas during 1996, the secondary enrolment rate was 86.8 per cent. Trinidad and Tobago had a secondary enrolment rate during 1995 of 73.9 per cent while the United States in that year had a rate of 97.4 per cent.

In Jamaica, for the school year 2000/01, $872 million was collected under the cost-sharing scheme. In addition, the Ministry of Education, Youth and Culture contributed $277 million to assist students who were unable to meet their cost sharing obligations in full or in part. Members of Parliament contributed a further $8 million toward cost-sharing on behalf of students. The total Government of Jamaica contribution towards the students' component of the cost-sharing scheme in 2000/01 was $285 million. Approximat-ely 17,000 students or 8.7 per cent of the students in the secondary system did not make any contribution to the cost-sharing scheme. As stated above, the Government picked up these students' contributions.

The election campaign has led to the call for free education for students attending secondary schools, i.e., the full payment of tuition fees by the State. This means that the $872 million, which was paid by parents and guardians, would instead be paid by the State. How is this similar to the voucher programme in the US?

Let us briefly examine how education is financed in the US.

Primary and secondary education in the US is the most important function of the local governments (city, county, or local school districts). The funding comes from local property taxes, funding from the State and Federal government budgets. Because the wealthier localities have higher revenues from local property taxes, often, larger and wealthier localities have better public schools with better equipment and better paid teachers than poorer localities, even though the funding from State and Federal government may be the same for all localities.

The Voucher Programme would give Federal and some State funding directly to parents, rather than school districts in the form of vouchers to be used at whichever school parents choose to send their children. Thus, better schools, including private and parochial schools, will get more federal funding and under-performing public schools will be penalised as more parents send their children elsewhere. Thus, this is a mere reallocation of education resources, from under-performing schools to better-performing schools.

This programme, however, is supported by a system-wide increase in support for promoting the teacher quality through training and recruitment (some US$4 billion in 2002). Thus there is a net increase in government funding of education to go along with the redistribution, although the increase may be distributed unevenly within the public school system. Since various public schools will now be competing for the vouchers, there is an incentive for schools and school districts to improve their performance.

Let us now examine the free education proposal and simplify the analysis by breaking it up into manageable components. Assume that the additional $872 million which would be required by the Government to execute this plan was sitting in a bank account somewhere, so that we do not for the moment have to concern ourselves as to where this money would come from. It is important to note that this free education proposal does not call for any additional resources to flow into the education system.

This proposal merely calls for a shifting of the burden of who should pay this $872 million. Instead of parents and guardians paying, the State would pay. This would be equivalent to a tax cut or income support of $872 million for people who happen to have children attending secondary schools. If the secondary school system is under-performing because of a resource constraint, the free education plan will not address this problem, since no additional resources would be flowing into the secondary school system. Some might be tempted to argue that parents and guardians will spend more on education now that they retain more of their disposable income. This may in fact be true. However, what is equally true is that the parents will not spend the full amount of this savings on education.

If the Government had $872 million sitting in a bank account it could ensure that $872 million is injected into the educational system by directly spending it on education, instead of giving it to parents/guardians and hoping that they in fact spend it on education rather than on other things. The Government could spend this money on additional classrooms and additional teachers so as to reduce class size or increase the teachers' salaries or buy additional computers or whatever else this sum of money would be able to buy.

If the society is interested in increasing the amount of resources spent on education, the best bang for the buck would be for the Government to spend the $872 million directly on education rather than giving it to parents/guardians in the form of tuition waivers for their children.

Assuming, of course, that the Government has or would be able to find the $872 million. Thus, like the school voucher programme in the US, the Free Education proposal is a mere reallocation of resources, in this case from the Government to parents. With no additional resources for the education system and no built-in incentive for schools to improve their performance, the Free Education proposal will do nothing to improve the quality of education. Free Education as a proposal to improve the education system in Jamaica therefore is a bad idea.

Part 2