Education is a competitive tool

Our competitiveness ranking has once again dropped, this time substantially. We lost 16 places in an annual World Economic Forum report. While four other Southeast Asian economies also saw their positions worsen, it was the Philippines which posted the largest fall. We remained second to the last among the eight economies in the region, besting only Cambodia. Countries like Algeria, Gambia, Sri Lanka and Namibia leapt ahead.

Like a good soldier, National Competitiveness Council co-chair and private sector representative Cesar B. Bautista tried to minimize the implication of the report. “It isn’t concentrated on what we are pursuing: human resources, red tape for business processes, energy costs, transportation infrastructure, and local governance. These are the ones that make firms more competitive,” he told Business World in a telephone interview.

The former Trade Secretary is probably just too caught up with his competitiveness advocacy to see the total picture. But even on the points he claims his council is concentrating on, it is pretty obvious that they haven’t really, honestly achieved much beyond making Power Point presentations to groups here and there.

In fact, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private sector investment arm of the World Bank has just concluded a study that says doing business in the Philippines has become more complicated relative to other countries. They attributed this to Ate Glue’s failure to implement reforms.

The Philippines was down three places to 144th out of 183 economies in the just-released 2010 Doing Business Report of the IFC, due mainly to lower or unchanged scores in monitored indicators. The IFC warned further slips could make firms unable to recover from the crisis, turn off foreign investors, and enlarge the non-taxpaying informal sector.

Anyway, the World Economic Forum, for its part, advised countries in early stages of economic development, including the Philippines, to focus on some basic indicators. “In the first stage, the economy is factor-driven and countries compete based on their factor endowments: primarily unskilled labor and natural resources…,” the report said.

“Maintaining competitiveness at this stage of development hinges primarily on well-functioning public and private institutions, well-developed infrastructure, a stable macroeconomic framework, and healthy and literate work force.” We definitely need better infrastructure and a more efficient and less corrupt bureaucracy to improve competitiveness. But most important of all, everything starts with a better educated workforce.

Indeed, even in the United States, President Obama and many concerned citizens like Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, the Oracle of Omaha, are worried about the impact of the deterioration of American education on America’s competitiveness. That is why improving the way America educates its future generations is an important plank of Mr. Obama’s program of government.

In his back-to-school message to its millions of schoolchildren, Mr. Obama urged American schoolchildren to realize the importance of education both on their future personal competitiveness and that of their country’s. He encouraged schoolchildren to rise above their mistakes and challenges to succeed in school, offering himself as an example of “a goof-off” who went on to make good.

Indeed, our own students could benefit from a Chief Executive who is as genuinely interested in improving the quality of education and serve as an inspiration as well. (Ate Glue as an inspiration to our youth? That’s a surrealistic thought!) The core of the message Obama delivered is personal responsibility. It is as if, doing their homework and making good in school is a patriotic duty because America’s future competitiveness and ability to stay a Superpower depends on it.

I guess it works for Obama because he has credibility and it can be seen that his administration is doing something to overhaul the thinking and the programs behind the American public education system. His advocacy of Charter Schools that puts a primacy on teacher effectiveness rather than just tenure is a good example of his seriousness in accomplishing needed reforms.

Back here, we rarely hear our Chief Executive talk of education reforms. Yet, the problem is serious and daunting. In fact, those of us in the private business sector who have to manage people and interview prospective employees often complain about the deterioration in the quality of graduates produced by our educational system.

Education Secretary Jesli Lapus dropped by the Tuesday Club this week and admitted that the job is Herculean but asserted that in his watch, he has made some headway. For one, Jesli claims that the National Achievement Test (NAT) results show continuous improvement. The increase of 21.36 per cent from 2006 to 2009, Jesli pointed out, is an indication of a steady improvement in primary education in our public school system.

He also cited percentage gains in all subject areas from 2006 to 2009 with Mathematics (28.02 percent) and Science (27.50 percent) having the best improvement. That may be true but let us not forget we are starting from a very low base so that such gains while encouraging, are still hardly enough to make us competitive even in the region.

There is one other problem that Jesli himself pointed out to us during our conversation and this is the deterioration in the quality of private education. Jesli said that the better public schools now beat the private schools in standard tests. That is probably because public school teachers are now better paid and better trained. Even in textbooks, Jesli says that despite some criticisms aired about textbooks used in public schools, at least these are now better screened than those used in the private schools.

Like in the US, the biggest stumbling block to reforms here is the vast education bureaucracy that is largely resistant to change. But Jesli said he believes he is making inroads here essentially by making sure the entrenched bureaucrats get ownership of the reforms he has introduced.

Jesli believes the positive performance indicators he has achieved, though still baby steps, can be sustained. There is a two per cent gain in elementary school participation from 83 per cent in 2007 and 85 per cent now. The remaining 15 percent are now targets of the Alternative Learning System he has introduced. In high school, participation rate improved from 59 percent in 2007 to 81 percent last year.

Dropout rate has slowed down to 6 per cent from 7.3 per cent for elementary and to 7 per cent from 9 percent in the secondary level. Some 132,127 public school teachers received various in-service training to enhance their teaching competencies.

Because the gains happened largely during Jesli’s watch, it is easy to say that it was his management competence and sense of mission that delivered the results rather than any thing that could be attributed to Ate Glue. After all, the prior years under Ate Glue and before Jesli experienced the rapid deterioration in these same measures.

This makes me wonder why Jesli should even consider moving anywhere else in government particularly the Senate where such competence will likely be lost. We should have a system where the best managers should be in critical line positions like that of an education secretary. Jesli has shown that competence in the line agencies can mitigate incompetence in Malacañang.

We have to convince Jesli that he will render better public service exactly where he is right now rather than join the windbags in our legislature. Maybe what we need to do is get a commitment from all the presidential hopefuls to keep Jesli at DepEd so that his reform program can be pursued to the point of producing meaningful results for our country’s competitiveness.

Having managed a large multinational himself, Jesli knows what is needed to improve our competitiveness overall. Jesli has shown he has a better perspective to tackle the problem than one who merely has a PhD in Education.

Jesli should be asked to sacrifice his ambition to be an elected Senator to continue with his work of assuring the education of our future generations of Filipinos. The last truly effective cabinet member who was wasted in the Senate was Juan Flavier. Jesli should not be the next. Let it be Jesli’s life’s mission to ensure our competitiveness in the years to come. –Boo Chanco (The Philippine Star)