Rural sixth-graders best city counterparts in NAT

News that these last three years, the sixth graders of rural-area schools got higher National Achievement Test (NAT) scores than their city-school counterparts should buoy up our hopes. It is a sign that despite the corruption and deficiencies of the government the neglected rural areas are not as doomed to failure and unrelieved poverty as the most pessimistic observers say they are.

(Why talk about government? Because even if your smart opinion is to favor small government and to ignore it if you want to achieve anything, the overpowering reality is that what government people do or don’t in our country can only be ignored by those with the power and the money to stop government officials and employees from using the power of their positions to keep others from doing the good things that ought to be done. This is a fact in business, farming, government service, and in smalltime as well as bigtime endeavors.)

For three years now, students of rural-area schools have been besting their urban cohort in the National Achievement Test (NAT). The NAT is a yearly examination to determine the achievement level, strengths and weaknesses of sixth graders in English, Science, Math, Filipino and Hekasi (Geography, History and Civics). Forty questions are asked in each subject.

In this year’s NAT results, rural area pupils got a Mean Percentage Score (MPS) of 66.67 percent. Their city cohort got only 64.15 percent. In 2008, rural sixth graders (65.52 MPS) also beat the city dwellers (64.43 MPS).

In 2007, rural pupils got 60.81 MPS, urban pupils 59.48.

Throughout the country, about 1.76 million pupils took the test this year. Most came from 31,196 public schools (68.2 percent), the rest from 2,386 private schools (31.8 percent).

The MPS this year registers an improvement of 11.67 points over the 2006 NAT’s MPS of 54.66.

We can only opine, as Education Undersecretary Vilma Labarador has, that the declining MPS of city pupils must be due to the distractions available in urban settings—malls, city noises, the ubiquitousness of entertainment on TV and cinemas.

Whatever the reason (perhaps the relative poverty of rural pupils also makes them want to excel more so they can get out of their depressing environment), the good showing of the rural children should suggest the following to our policy-makers:

1. That more serious attention should be given to plans (these exist on paper) to resurrect the agricultural and agribusiness health of our country.

2. That the overall bias of the national budget in all departments of life in favor of the cities should be corrected.

Education Secretary Jesli Lapus correctly takes pride in the percentage increase of 21.36 percent from 2006 to 2009 in the NAT. He says it indicates a steady improvement in primary education in the country’s public school system.

“The investments we poured in to improve learning outcomes are now giving dividends,” Lapus said.

Percentage gains were also noted in all subject areas from 2006 to 2009 with Mathematics (28.02 percent) and Science (27.50 percent) showing the biggest improvement.

Still, so many improvements must be made in our fundamentally defective basic education system. Among the most obvious are the lack of school buildings and classrooms, the use of substandard and error-ridden textbooks (as crusadingly pointed out constantly by Mr. Antonio Calipjo Go who has been persecuted for heroically serving as the people’s textbook watchdog), the need to hire more competent teachers for Math and Science, and so on.

But one must agree that from 2006 to 2009, the Department of Education has put more funds on human resource development especially on teacher training programs.

We hope and pray Secretary Lapus and his fellow officials at DepEd attend more zealously to—and succeed in mending—the deficiencies of our basic education system. –Manila Times