By JENNIFER SANTIAGO
HIGH dropout rates. Low pupil performance. Poor teacher quality. Inappropriate language of learning. Irrelevant textbooks. Excessive centralization. Inadequate financial resources.
This is how Yale University professor George Counts described the Philippine educational system in 1925, when he did a study on the performance of the country’s school system.
More than eight decades since Counts’ study, the educational system has barely improved and is facing the very same, if not even more, problems of access, equity, quality, and relevance.
The dismally stagnant state of education in the country was scrutinized in the latest edition of the Philippine Human Development Report (PHDR) launched Wednesday by the Human Development Network in cooperation with the United Nations Devlopment Programme and the New Zealand Agency for International Development.
With the theme “Institutions and Politics,” the 2008/2009 PHDR gave special attention to the Department of Education (DepEd) being the largest institution in the country’s bureaucracy with one of the most important contributions to human development. It likewise looked into the crucial roles of the Civil Service Commission and the Department of Budget and Management.
The PHDR said it chose to focus on institutions because “deeper than policies and larger than individuals, it is the institutions that structure behavior which matter deeply for whether human development advances or not.”
The report called the country’s educational system a “puzzle” for continually being in crisis despite decades of “diagnosis, prognosis and reform initiatives.”
“From 1925, when Counts published his article as part of the 1925 Monroe Survey team, up to the 1990s, various reviews of the state of education had cited the same fundamental issues afflicting Philippine education,” said the PHDR, which is now on its sixth edition.
While the report reported some gains in pupil performance, it observed that the achievement in formal basic education has remained “pathetically low.”
Only 15.3 percent of elementary schools scored 75 percent or higher level—75 percent being the required minimum competency for the next level of schooling— in the 2006 National Achievement Test (NAT). The situation is worse for high schools, where less than one percent made it past the 75 percent level in school year 2005-2006.
“Compared to the performance of Filipino pupils in science and math in the 1920s, which approximated that of American children, current day performance in these subjects is dismal,” said the PHDR.
Data showed that only 25.3 percent of schools crossed the 75 percent level in math while a very low 8.4 percent did so in science in the 2006 NAT. It revealed that students from about half of the schools did not even learn 60 percent of what they ought to in the two subjects.
Dropout rates likewise remain significant and have persisted for more than four decades since the 1960s. Various studies cited in the report show that one in three children who enter the school system does not finish elementary education, while only less than half of those who enter high school manage to complete secondary education.
Indonesia and Malaysia both had higher primary net enrollment rates at 96 percent and almost 100 percent, respectively, and completion rates of 99 percent and 95 percent. Even Laos and Cambodia fared better than the Philippines with only 72 percent of Filipino children completing their primary schooling compared to 75 percent of Lao and 87 percent of Cambodian children.
The language problem
The PHDR cited the language issue as an example of a problem that has remained unresolved for 83 years, with DepEd repeatedly ignoring research findings that the use of the child’s native language as a medium of instruction enhances learning in the early years.
Learning in a language that is alien to them causes children to lose the motivation for school. This is why, the report said, the highest dropout rate in the primary level is reported in Grade 2, when “children may have lost motivation to attend school because they could have experienced failure in reading and writing in Filipino and English.”
The education department tackled the language issue in 1973 but the outcome was the poorly formulated and unrevised Bilingual Education Policy (BEP) of 1973, which identified subject matters where both English and Filipino could be used as languages of learning.
“The fact that achievement in both English and Filipino has been low for more than
two decades suggests that the BEP is not being implemented well enough to result in proficiency in both languages,” the PHDR concluded.
It said that “the strongest proof of the BEP’s failure” is evident in the profile of the younger set of teachers currently implementing the policy. These teachers were themselves students during its initial implementation and have been reported as greatly deficient in their English language skills.
Rather than crafting a language policy based on research findings, the DepEd allows politicians to dictate it and awaits directives from Congress and the President on the matter, the PDHR said.
“With the promise of employment for Filipinos in the call center industry/resource management sector, the Arroyo administration is aggressively championing the use of English as the medium of instruction in schools,” the PHDR said.
Lack of leadership and funds
The PHDR attributed persistent education issues primarily to leadership problems and lack of funds.
It pointed out that the DepEd had 13 education secretaries in the last 30 years, serving an average term in office of 27 months. The highest turnover was recorded under the Arroyo administration. In the past seven years, four secretaries and one acting secretary served an average of 18 months each.
“Since the basic education cycle is 10 years, one might understandably attribute the failure to adopt or implement education reforms to the mismatch between the long-term requirements of the system and the short-term tenure of department leaders,” the PHDR concluded.
The PHDR blamed the Philippine government’s low investment in education for the DepEd’s “almost absolute dependence” on foreign funds over the last 20 years. The DepEd’s share in the national budget was almost a constant 13 percent from 1995 to 2008. The education budget is only half of the global norm of 5 to 6 percent of gross domestic product.
“Indeed, the ‘externally induced, disjointed, and projectized mode of pursuing education reform’ by the DepEd, is a key factor in understanding its inability to institutionally adapt or implement the reforms which have been indicated for over 80 years,” it explained.
The report acknowledged the significant changes in Philippine education in the last 20 years as a result of several important broad frameworks for education reform that have been instituted, such as the Education for All: The Philippine Plan of Action 1990-1999, the 1991 Congressional Commission on Education (EDCOM), the 2000 Presidential Commission on Education Reform (PCER), and the 2006 Basic Education Sector Reform Agenda (BESRA).
However, the DepEd failed to translate most structural reforms into large scale, integrated, and sustained outcomes. The PHDR cited two cases as examples—the the partial implementation of Republic Act 9155, also known as the 2001 Governance of Basic Education Act through School-based Management (SBM), and the still unresolved language problem.
Decentralization works
The PHDR noted that the severest criticism of the Philippine education system in 1925 by the Monroe Survey was its excessive centralized control which resulted in the lack of initiative in various branches.
It added that the centralized bureaucracy tended to “adopt a one-size-fits-all policy for culturally diverse contexts, its unresponsiveness to local needs, and vulnerability to corruption.”
Decentralization through site management, or school-based management (SBM), has been a major global education reform thrust since the 1980s, which the Philippines itself adopted as policy through R.A. 9155.
According to the PHDR, the SBM was carried out through two externally funded projects—the Third Elementary Education Project (TEEP) and the Basic Education Assistance for Mindanao (BEAM). Both projects had notable effects on pupil performance and led to significant changes in some aspects of the institutional “classroom and management cultures” of the DepEd at least for the duration of the projects.
Specifically, it reported that the BEAM succeeded in changing the competency standards for teachers, advancing the development of student assessment, and championing the quality of Muslim education nationwide. TEEP meanwhile enabled the dispersal of funds from the central office to the divisions and, finally, to schools.