Public schools need more money

IT used to be that a good education meant a ticket out of poverty. For a lot of people that hope still rings true, but unfortunately those who need a good education the most are the ones who can’t afford it.

Budget Secretary Florencio Abad said that Philippine education is in “deep crisis” when he met with heads of state universities and colleges (SUCs) in the Cordillera and Ilocos regions recently.

The 2010 Annual Poverty Indicator Survey report released early this month showed that 16 percent or 6.24 million of the total 39 million Filipinos 6 to 24 years old are out-of-school youths.

The government report said the primary reason given by out-of-school youths for not attending school is the high cost of education, followed by lack of personal interest.

Abad said the nation’s children are not in school not just for academic reasons but for other reasons like malnutrition and poverty.

It’s a vicious cycle because those who can’t get a good education are likely to remain poor, and it is their poverty that prevents them from going to school in the first place.

Abad said even if children finish secondary education, they come up with poor achievement levels; and for many of them, high school is the end of the line, as their parents force them to work to help support their families.

Only 15 percent end up with a college degree and only 5 percent of them earn degrees in the hard sciences, making for a weak foundation in the whole education system, Abad said.

This is true. Those who do finish college would find that their chances of getting employed are slim. Many of the graduates our schools are producing have skills that are not employable in today’s workplaces.

According to the Trade Union Congress of the Philippines, college graduates have the highest unemployment rate in the country at 26 percent.

Even the booming BPO industry, one of the major components of the services sector has a serious recruitment problem: for every 100 applicants only a small percentage—around 2 to 5 percent—are ready to be hired while the rest fail because of poor English communication and technical skills.

We have to make quality education more affordable and the only way to do this is to devote more state resources to the education system.

As senators have already started their marathon floor deliberations on the 2012 national budget bill, I hope they would find merit in making a few insertions to augment the state budget for education.

Our public schools are plagued by a lack of facilities, qualified teachers and, as already pointed out, an atrocious dropout rate.

The Department of Education said that despite all their recent efforts to fill the glaring foundational gaps, there is still a shortage of 103,612 elementary and secondary school teachers, 66,800 classrooms, 2,573,212 pieces of school furniture and 146,000 toilets.

Our education system has slipped way behind our neighbors in the region. According to the 2010-2011 Global Competitiveness Report of the World Economic Forum, the Philippines ranks a poor seventh among nine Southeast Asian nations in the fields of education, science and technology, and innovation.

In the area of primary education, the Philippines ranked 99th out of 138 countries, 69th in educational system, 112th in science and math, and 76th on Internet access. In all categories we were behind Singapore, Brunei, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam. We fared only better than Cambodia.

It has been close to two decades since the Congressional Commission on Education (EdCom), a joint-body of the Senate and the House of Representatives, went around the country to make a national review and assessment of the Philippine education system, and came out with a set of recommendations that sought to solve these very problems that haunt us today. I was a member of EdCom.

Since then the government has restructured the Education department with the creation of the Commission on Higher Education (Ched) and the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (Tesda). It passed laws like the Magna Carta for Public School Teachers, the Government Assistance to Students and Teachers in Private Education, and the Special Program for Employment of Students. We have supposedly institutionalized funding for textbook assistance, tuition supplements and loans, scholarships, science and technology, vocational and technical training, faculty development, collaboration with private industries.

And yet even with all these good laws, policies and programs, it is clear that our education system is far from ideal. We are still a long way off from actualizing the Constitution’s mandate to make quality education accessible to all.

The problem, as always, is money. There is a huge gap between the commitments we make on paper and the investments we are making in terms of actual disbursement of funds.

We have one of the lowest allocations for education in the Asean. The 2011 budget allocations for DepEd and state universities and colleges in the General Appropriations Act show the miniscule amounts spent by the government on a per student basis. And since education is one of the most important factors that contribute toward poverty alleviation, this is also why our neighbors in the region have left us in the dust economically.

While corruption, as the President’s campaign slogan goes, could be blamed for our country’s poverty, so too can a poorly educated citizenry.

We have to put more money and resources behind our education laws, programs and policies, enough to ensure their effective implementation. Only then can our nation be the epitome of economic strength. -ERNESTO F. HERRERA, Manila Times

ernestboyherrera@yahoo.com