The sorry state of education

As we were driving along a rugged and steep road in a barangay in Lobo, Batangas at around five o’clock in the afternoon, one day last week, we met school children walking from a public school to their home. We estimated that easily these kids would have to walk at least some three to five kilometers of dirt and rugged road to go to school and the same distance to get home every school day. It wasn’t raining then but still one could not help feeling sorry for the kids as some were walking barefoot—backpacks and all—treading on sharp rocks and inhaling dust from passing vehicles. I tried not to imagine how they manage when it rains because it would only aggravate the dismay I felt. But there is simply no other option for these kids as schools are painfully few and far between in the remote areas of this country.

This, to me, was a particularly disturbing sight. Batangas is a province that lies not too far away from Metropolitan Manila. How worse off could school children be in the more remote barrios up north such as the Mountain Province; down south in Mindanao; and in the thousands of other islands that make up this country?

I was hardly surprised then when I read the 2008 to 2009 Philippine Human Development Report which contained a disconcerting chapter about the Philippine state of education. The Report was launched on May 20, 2009 by the Philippine Institute for Development Studies together with its partners, the United Nations Development Programme and the New Zealand International Agency for International Assistance.

The report says that despite years of diagnosis, prognosis and reform initiatives, Philippine education remains in crisis. It says that out of 100 children who enter Grade 1, only 86 move on to Grade 2; only 76 move on to Grade 4; 67 to Grade 6 and only 65 out of every 100 will finally complete the full elementary cycle of six years. Then out of these, only 58 children will go to high school, of whom, only 42 will graduate four years later. This number represents less than half of those who entered the elementary school and excludes those who totally did not start any education at all. What’s more? The achievement levels as measured by national tests are alarmingly low, the study continues. Recent results show that fewer than seven in every one hundred seniors passed the English test with a score of at least 75 percent. Only 13 percent passed mathematics while only 0.7 percent passed science. Over all, only 2 percent of all high school seniors garnered a passing grade of 75 percent. And even if the passing grade were lowered to 50 percent, only one-third of all the examinees would have passed, the study said.

The authors of the report blamed the sorry state of Philippine education to a number of culprits. First is budget. The budget of the Department of Education has remained constant from 1998 to 2008 at 13 percent. Yet, the number of enrollees in the public elementary and high schools grow per year at an average of 1.8 percent. On a per-student basis, the budget has declined by 3 percent per year. Multiply that by 10 years and the result is a decrease in real terms in the budget for education for the last 10 years by 30 percent.

The budget for education hardly has any room for building of new schools, improvement of educational facilities and the upgrading of books and teaching methods. About 89 percent of the budget for education goes to personnel services and salaries while 8 percent is for maintenance and other operating expenses. A measly 3 percent is allocated to capital outlays such as classrooms, equipment and facilities.

The second cause of the decline of the quality of education is leadership, the report said. In the last 30 years, there have been 13 secretaries of education. The average term of office is 27 months for an Education Secretary. The highest turnover occurred in the last seven years, in the term of President Gloria Arroyo, where there have been four education secretaries and one acting secretary, each serving an average of only 18 months. Since the basic education cycle is 10 years, one might easily attribute the failure to adopt or implement education reforms to the mismatch between the long-term requirements of the system and the short term tenure of education secretaries, the report said.

The third reason for the sorry state of education is the perverse incentives in the civil service which have taken their toll in the entire bureaucracy. This has resulted in a stagnant or decreasing trend in quality at all levels in the government service, the report said. Salaries in government can be as much as 75 percent lower than comparable jobs in the private sector. Worse, within the bureaucracy itself, salaries are not always uniform, resulting in serious demoralization. There are other factors contributing to the sinking morale of employees in the public service. For one, ad-hoc bodies and presidential advisers under the Office of the President have been increasing in the recent years, leading to distortion in salaries and overlapping of functions. For another, political appointees who, sometimes, do not have eligibility, have been made to fill up plantilla positions.

Education is what lifts a people from poverty. It is the greatest equalizer of all because with education, one can rise from abject poverty to wealth. Yet, in our country, education does not enjoy the priority it deserves. The Office of the President had “savings” (unused appropriations) of P11.4 billion in 2004 and P 117.5 billion in 2007. The President has the discretion to spend or to appropriate these amounts for whatever purpose in the executive branch. Yet, pray tell, where are these funds being spent? It is everybody’s guess but certainly not in building new schools, upgrading educational equipment and facilities or even improving the salaries of public school teachers to attract and retain the best in the teaching profession. –RITA LINDA V. JIMENO, Manila Standard Today

E-mail: ritalinda@jimenolaw.com.ph Visit: www.jimenolaw.com.ph