The battle over education in the DR

(One has to be careful when using blogger on Iphone...I accidentally deleted this blog from March 25, and repost it now)
A bit more than a year ago, the DR suddenlyexperienced one of its first modern collective, civil-society mobilisations,and it articulated demands for better quality in the education system in thecountry. The protests hit President Leonel Fernández quite hard and the size,level of uproar and level of mobilisation was a surprise, I think, both to thegovernment and everyone else.

The demands were for the government to comply with law 66/97 that stipulates that the education ministry shouldreceive funds equivalent to 4% of the country's GDP. The law was passed duringLeonel's first government, but with the votes also from the opposition (PRD).Anyway, since 1997 the governments have never met this target, and the fundsgiven to education has lingered between 1.5-1.8% of GDP since 1998. Obviously,all three Fernández administrations and the Mejía administration violated theeducation law.

Last year groups mainly from the middleclass organised rather spontaneously and using new social networks to demandthat the government comply with the law of education and spend 4% of GDP oneducation. The group used yellow as its colour and the message was simple (as it was unrealistic): Idemand 4%. Leonel's nice rhetoric finally met with the hard realities and thetwo did not match up. The organisers of the 4% actions were so succesful thatthe government became rather desperate. Suddenly people wearing yellow t-shirts were denied access to the cathedral, national monuments and other publicplaces. (the serious) Parts of Leonel's own party started demanding that forthe 2011 budget the President should correct former wrongs and add more fundsto education. The opposition of course was also demanding (suddenly) more fundsfor education, even though in all previous years the PRD and PRSC had remainedrelatively silent on the subject. The whole debacle was an interestingdemonstration of civil society mobilisation moving setting the agenda andcreating sufficient momentum to actually achieve positive results. I wasactually quite impressed since this does not occur frequently in the DR (exceptfor taxi drivers and transporters' strikes which generally achieve their goals).

To almost everyone's disappointment, Leonel presented a budget for 2011 (andlater for 2012) that did not increase the funds for education, and Congress passed a law that basically gave President Fernández the right to violate the 66/97 education law and spend less than that law stipulated on education. Leonel thus presenteda budget that maintained funding for education stable at about 1.8% of GDP. Theprotests, however, together with an internal dissent in the PLD led Congress toincrease funds for education about 4,000 million DOP, which could beinterpreted as a victory (albeit a small one) for the opposition and the 4%group. This of course was old news until FLACSO (Facultad Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales) and others decided to follow up the government's effort ineducation. A recent report by FLACSO picked up by Diario Libre, Hoy and othernews media, demonstrated that the ministry of education spent 6,788 million DOPless than budgeted by congress. The ministry thus spent less than theadministration had originally proposed in the budget. In fact the ministryspent only about 85% of what was budgeted after Congress's increase of about4,000 million DOP. The renowned journalist Juan Bolívar Díaz called it "Otra burla a la voluntad popular" in the newspaper Hoy on Sunday, March 25.

This news has come back to haunt the PLDgovernment led by Leonel Fernández, himself an educated, and intellectual,president, who one would think, believing in his speeches, would supporteducation. The story became big news both in Diario Libre, Acento and Hoy. My research, however, demonstrates that the recent negligence ineducation, and the recent under-spending, is not new, but rather follows up along-held legacy since Balaguer's 12 años (1966-1978) (for more, see for instance my Master's thesis and my article in ALH.

The graph above shows spending compared to passed budget in the ministry of education from 1966-2009 (data based on official proposed budget and executed budget). Basically the graph demonstrates that it is quite normal that DR administrations spend less money on education than what is originally budgeted. In fact from 1966-2009, on average only 87% of the budget was spent by the ministry of education. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that the ministry of education only managed to spend 85% of its budgeted funds in 2011. The graph, however, also demonstrates that the trend is that governments in the DR are improving. Starting out at about 80% of spent allocations, the ministry of education today is spending on average more than 90% of its funds. This indeed, is a positive development, even though it has taken more than forty years... 

But, how much do Dominican governments spend on education? Generally the country score extremely low in Latin American comparisons. The following graph tracks the percentage of all budget expenses that goes to education in the same 1966-2009 period.

Now, beware that this is percentage of all budget expenses, not percentage of GDP which the big 4% debate is about. The graph demonstrates first that as share of all budget expenses became less important as the Balaguer administrations (1966-1978, 1986-1990) progressed, and that education received its lowest share of the budget during the Balaguer regimes. Furthermore, the administrations that took over after Balaguer (PRD 1978, PLD in 1996) increased drastically education's share of total budget expenses. However, under both PRD's first and second stint in power (1992-86, 2000-04), education lost importance with time, in both periods maybe due to the on-going economic hardship that hit the PRD administrations. After Mejía left power in 2004, Fernández's administrations did not increase spending to education, and the budgets have stabilised about 8-10% of all budget expenses.

What can we conclude: All administrations do not pay sufficient attention to education in the DR, all administration tend to give less money than budgeted to education, a fact that makes matters worse, and all administrations since 1997 have broken the law (and some might say the constitution). There is therefore good reasons to be sceptical towards the candidates' promises of 4% to education. Regardless of this it is also important that the well-intentioned groups fighting for the 4% target accept compromises along the road since doubling the education ministry's budget would not bevery fruitful. The education ministry would probably not know how to tackle so much funds and it would only open up for more corruption. What one could hope for is stable increases in the budget share for education so that in maybe 10 years the country might reach the target established by law. The great disappointment for the Dominicans should be that this development never started in 1998.