10-pt. education reform campaign launched to elect ‘Education President’

MANILA, Philippines—education Nation, a coalition of captains of industry and other concerned citizens, Wednesday launched a blueprint for reform to save the Philippine education system from collapse.

The coalition presented its 10-Point Education Reform Agenda and offered it to presidential candidates in an effort to make education the No. 1 issue in the May elections.

“We at Education Nation are saying ‘Enough!’ We cannot simply sit back and watch our education system further deteriorate in the hands of a government that has shown little concern for the plight of millions of Filipino children,” Ramon del Rosario Jr., chair of the Philippine Business for Education (PBEd), said at the launch held at the Asian Institute of Management (AIM) in Makati City.

“What we are seeing is that we really need an Education President, because … we have to have at the very top somebody who is ready to call the shots and enforce the principles, if we are to reform education,” said Edilberto de Jesus, AIM president and former education secretary.

“With this agenda, we are offering our presidential candidates and their respective teams—all the way down to the mayors—a list of 10 things they can achieve for education over the next three to six years,” Del Rosario said.

Del Rosario said the “10 doable things” could “make a world of difference for learning and achieving in this country.”

10 doable things

The “10 doable things” envisioned to reform Philippine education are:

• Increasing the education budget to 4 percent of the gross national product to make it at par with other countries.

• Enhancing basic education by adding two more years to it.

• Promoting academic excellence by developing globally benchmarked standards of excellence.

• Developing community ownership of schools.

• Ensuring universal access to education.

• Strengthening higher education.

• Empowering teachers.

• Building transparency and accountability.

• Supporting private education.

• Maximizing alternative learning.

The PBEd, a major pillar of Education Nation, includes such business heavyweights as Jaime Augusto Zobel de Ayala (Ayala Corp.), Oscar Lopez (First Philippine Holdings Corp.), Manuel V. Pangilinan (Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co.), Washington Sycip (The SGV Group), Lance Gokongwei (JG Summit Holdings), Tony Tan Caktiong (Jollibee Food Corp.) and Marixi R. Prieto (Philippine Daily Inquirer).

The priority

Del Rosario said that with Wednesday’s launch, “we serve notice to our candidates that we—parents, teachers, students, business leaders, administrators, civil society representatives and other education stakeholders—shall vote for education come May 2010 and beyond.”

“In unveiling these 10 points, we wish to give fair warning that there should be no more excuses. Our country deserves quality education for all. We demand it. We will watch over it. We shall fight for it,” he said, adding that education should not only be “a priority” but “the priority.”

PBEd president Chito Salazar said Education Nation wanted to make education the No. 1 issue and not merely “one of my top 10” because “we also think it is the main route out of poverty.”

He said the 10-point agenda would be presented during a congress of educators next month, and later to vice presidential and senatorial candidates.

“Our objective is to make the entire nation and the education system genuinely functional in order to give everyone the opportunity to better their lives,” Salazar said.

Del Rosario noted that according to the United Nations’ 2010 Education For All Global Monitoring Report, Philippine education indicators were below “what might be expected for a country at its income level,” and that there was “a real danger that the country will fail to achieve universal primary education by 2015.”

The report also said the Philippines was “a particularly striking example of underperformance” worldwide when it came to education reforms.

De Jesus said that “in terms of perception,” Philippine education had “gone down very many steps” in Southeast Asia.

“After a period when they were sending their students here to get higher education degrees, now our degrees are kind of discounted. It hurts our overseas Filipino workers,” De Jesus said. –Philip Tubeza, Philippine Daily Inquirer