It’s the basics, stupid
Fifteen years after a congressional commission defined the problems besetting the education system, much remains to be done to check and reverse the worsening state of basic education. Some of the commission’s recommendations have been adopted, such as the establishment of the Commission on Higher Education and the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority. But it seems the separation of higher learning and vocational education from the responsibility of the old Department of Education, Culture and Sports has only underscored the knotty state of basic education and along with that, the problematic bureaucracy and workings of the new but graft-prone Department of Education (DepEd).As the Inquirer series, “Education in Crisis,” demonstrated, despite the commission’s findings and recommendations, education has taken a turn for the worse. A Unesco report ranked the Philippines 74th in terms of the Education Development Index, below Mongolia, Vietnam, Indonesia and China. Results of the National Elementary Achievement Test and National Secondary Achievement Test showed that students could only correctly answer less than 50 percent of the questions. And Philippine students performed poorly in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science study, ranking 41st in a field of 45 in Science and 42nd in Math.
Apparently the education system faces two major challenges: access to education, and issues of quality. The commission already identified 15 years ago the need to stress basic public education because that’s all the formal schooling the masses of Filipinos get and because they are entitled to that constitutionally. But the shortage of classrooms has become graver through the years -- some 41,000 as of this year, which means P16 billion is needed for the construction of new classrooms. The student-teacher ratio is the worst in the region so that the Philippines has an average class size of 43.9 students in public elementary schools and 56.1 in public high schools.
The sticky problem of access to education can be seen in the high dropout rate. Fifty-one percent of Filipinos have had only elementary education. Only 14.3 percent of rural poor Filipinos graduate from high school or have higher educational attainment.
Access, of course, refers to “quantity.” And when numbers are involved, can corruption be far behind? This seems to bug Sen. Edgardo Angara, who headed the congressional commission. He said that international donors and business concerns had given the DepEd a tremendous amount of money but the department had nothing to show for it. No assessment has been made of the impact of the scarce resources put by donors and businesses into the DepEd. The needs of the DepEd are “a bottomless pit,” he concluded.
Angara also expressed suspicion about DepEd statistics, which he described as “inaccurate, sometimes even falsified.”
Eventually, issues of quantity, including accuracy of statistics, have a bearing on the other major problem of Philippine education: quality. In fact, the report had suggested the close link between quantity and quality, arguing that since throwing money into the system would not be good enough, then it would be better to go for value-added -- in another word, quality. “There’s only one thing we can do,” the commission report said. “We must extract more efficiency and more productivity from both our education budget and our education department.”
There’s the rub. As Angara has said, there has been no impact report on the money poured into the DepEd by donors and businesses. For example, multilateral and bilateral institutions have poured millions into textbook development, but the textbook regime of the DepEd remains under a cloud of doubt over defective and substandard textbooks. Moreover, Congress keeps on passing laws establishing new public schools without checking if existing schools are delivering the goods well. Meanwhile, the government is pushing for an ambitious cyber education program to would be backed by international funding, except that even Filipino IT experts doubt if the Philippines has the competence to establish and manage such a program; and in any case, what’s immediately needed is to address the basic lack of classrooms and teachers, not the lack of multimedia.
Obviously education reforms are needed, but they should start at the heart of the matter: a bureaucracy that is supposed to address the needs of the education system but can’t get the basics right.
