By JONATHAN DE SANTOS
TO reform the Philippine public school system, they have to start at an early age. And that doesn’t mean students. That means teachers.
This was the message of Wendy Kopp, founder of a U.S. group called Teach for All, who is in the Manila to promote the idea of getting the country’s top college graduates and professionals to commit to teaching in high-need urban and rural public schools in the Philippines.
Kopp founded the Teach for America program in 1989 to get college graduates to teach at “highest-need” schools in the United States. The idea was to create a highly qualified volunteer teachers’ corps as an alternative to the aggressive recruitment by Wall Street firms.
That program, Teach For America, has so far produced 28,000 alumni, more than half of who chose to either stay in education or are working in fields related to education reform.
The program has not only changed participants, many of whom were, like Kopp, part of the “Me Generation” of the 1980s. It has changed the schools they taught in as well.
Kopp told members of the Makati Business Club, the Management Association of the Philippines, and Philippine Business for Education that the program has made school performance in New Orleans, Louisiana skyrocket.
From an average high school graduation rate of 54 percent, around 78 percent of high school seniors in schools in New Orleans now graduate. Around 40 percent of them are considered “college ready”, up from around just 25 percent.
“We are now looking at the New Orleanses of the world,” Kopp, who admitted she initially only considered confining the program to the US, said.
That, at least, is the idea behind Teach for the Philippines, a program where top college graduates and professionals are tapped to teach.
MBC and MAP president Ramon del Rosario, speaking at the same event, called the project “the merging of business interests and education reform.”
He said that although the Philippine economy grew 6.6 percent last year, the Philippines also lost 800,000 jobs, with unemployed youth making up most of those who don’t have jobs.
He said that could be attributed to the lack of both quality education and a readiness to work. Although the K-12 program will help address that, the expanded program also means a backlog of 61,500 teachers.
By 2017, the Philippines will need an additional 55,000 teachers for the expanded program, he said. The problem there, he said, is that “very few are qualified to enter the education system (as teachers).”
“Teachers, and teaching as a profession has to be rethought, revitalized, and reformatted,” del Rosario said.
Teach for the Philippines, which already has 54 fellows who will begin teaching in June, may be a way to make teaching a more inviting career path.
According to a fact sheet distributed at the event, the fellows come from top universities in the Philippines and the U.S., and were “handpicked by the selection committee for their demonstrated leadership capacity and fervent passion for education.”
They are currently going through an intensive training program on lesson planning, classroom management, and subject content.
The first batch of fellows will be deployed to 10 schools in Quezon City, chosen based on “teacher need, relative safety concerns, and their fit with the program.”
Their participation in the program will give them credits towards a Master’s Degree in Education, but Teach for the Philippines hopes it gives them more than that.
“We hope that our fellows will commit to be lifelong advocates for education regardless of their eventual career path in the public or private sector,” Teach for the Philippines said.
That approach may be what will encourage many graduates of the country’s top universities to consider teaching at Philippine public schools for at least two years.
Kopp said that in the United States, participating in Teach for America is seen as a “leadership development opportunity” by its corporate partners as well as by other companies.
She said she hopes the same will happen in the Philippines. “We want many of the future leaders (of the country) to say that before they work in your firms, they will teach first,” Kopp said.
That model has worked well for Teach for America so far. For 2013, the program received 57,000 applications for 6,200 teaching positions in high-need schools in the US.
Those will just be the latest in a veritable army of 10,400 Teach for America fellows in their first and second year of teaching in 46 regions of the US and touching the lives of 750,000 students.
With similar recognition in the Philippines, Kopp said the process of getting the cum laude graduates of the country’s top universities to consider teaching, whether as a career move or as an actual career, would be “greatly accelerated.”
Can the project succeed in the Philippines? Kopp, who has coordinated with similar programs across the world, said it can. She said the challenges faced by the world’s most marginalized children are the same.
“They are more similar than different, and the solutions are shareable,” she said.
That means lessons learned from the successes of Teach for America and a similar project called “Teach First” in the UK can be applied to the Philippines.
The success of Teach for the Philippines will also mean not just a victory for Philippine education but also an enrichment of the Teach for All program that can be used in other countries.