The Department of Education (DepEd) needs to push more decision-making and resources down to schools and local governments to address delays and bottlenecks caused by its highly centralized system, education reform advocate and former DepEd undersecretary Reynaldo Laguda said.

Laguda said the country had adopted the principle of shared governance two decades ago under Republic Act No. 9155, but the education system continued to rely heavily on a central bureaucracy to serve about 48,000 public schools.

“When everything flows through the center, schools wait. Funds arrive late. Decisions are slow. And very little or no room for local innovation,” Laguda said.

He said decentralization should go beyond simply transferring functions from the DepEd central office to lower offices. It should give schools and local governments the authority, capacity and resources to make and implement decisions, while ensuring accountability and transparency.

Laguda outlined three channels for decentralization: deconcentration within DepEd, devolution to local government units (LGUs), and stronger partnerships with the private sector.

Under deconcentration, authority would be redistributed from the central office to regional and division offices and ultimately to schools.

Devolution would involve sharing or transferring certain functions to LGUs, an approach Laguda said would require further discussion of the legal framework governing local governments and education.

He said the two approaches should be complemented by stronger public-private partnerships, particularly in areas where non-government organizations and private schools can help address education needs.

Authority must come with resources

Laguda warned against treating decentralization as merely a transfer of authority. He proposed five elements that must move together: capacity, authority, resources, accountability and transparency.

Capacity refers to the skills needed to perform a function; authority to the legitimate power to make decisions; resources to the funds, personnel and materials needed to implement them; accountability to responsibility for results; and transparency to access to timely and understandable information.

“The first three enable action, while the latter two safeguard those three,” he said.

Giving authority without the capacity to exercise it effectively could simply shift problems from the central office to schools, Laguda said.

He cited a hypothetical example of giving a school head full authority to hire teachers without providing training on evaluating teacher competence or conducting a fair selection process.

The school head could either defer the decision to the division office or make a poor hiring decision, he said.

“Authority without capacity causes paralysis,” Laguda said.

The same principle applies to funding. Giving schools control over spending without providing sufficient resources would leave them with authority on paper but little ability to act.

“If we tell a school head you now decide how to spend your MOOE ... but the disbursement formula is not revised, we hand over a decision with no way to act on that,” he said.

Decisions closer to schools

Laguda said decentralization should not mean that DepEd's central office loses control over the education system.

Instead, each level should have a clearly defined role based on where a decision can be made most effectively.

The central office should focus on national policy and standards, regional offices on oversight, division offices on translating policy to local conditions, and schools on managing implementation, he said.

“Not every problem needs to travel all the way to the top. Authority flows down, but everything should flow up,” Laguda said.

The objective, he said, is to create a system that can identify and correct problems based on evidence from the ground.

Pilot local autonomy

Laguda proposed a phased decentralization roadmap beginning in 2026 and running through 2035.

The first phase, from 2026 to 2028, would focus on preparing DepEd's systems and creating pilot “sandboxes” where schools and LGUs could test greater local participation in identifying needs, setting priorities and designing programs.

“Change of political administration and then we always have this great big reset,” Laguda said. “So we want to make sure that we don't have that great big reset when it's not needed.”

The second phase, from 2029 to 2031, would refine and expand approaches that prove effective, including greater school-level autonomy.

By 2035, Laguda said, the central office should be focused primarily on national policy and standards, with more operational decisions handled by lower levels.

Laguda acknowledged that decentralizing a system serving millions of learners and tens of thousands of schools would be a major governance reform.

But he said the ultimate measure should not be how much authority is taken away from the central office, but whether schools are better equipped to improve learning.

“Better governance is not the end goal, but it is how we get what we all want: quality learning for all,” Laguda said.