Child First, Education First; basketball courts can wait
MindaNews / 28 August 2005

GENERAL SANTOS CITY -- Basketball courts and waiting sheds can wait, education can’t.

Mindanao’s youngest governor has embarked on a "Child First" policy, spending more funds on education instead of basketball courts and waiting sheds.

Governor Miguel Dominguez said he has increased the budget for Paaral Para Sa Sarangans (PPSS or Education for Sarangans), from P700,000 last year to P1.8 million this schoolyear 2005-2006.

The PPSS "provides assistance to poor but deserving students in the secondary, vocational and college education."

"Various projects have been implemented and pipelined for both the elementary and secondary levels in the different schools of the province," the 28-year old governor said in a press statement.

But Dominguez acknowledged that much needs to be done to improve the province’s educational system to boost the students' skills.

Dominguez said the municipalities contributed P3.5 million as counterpart fund to Synergia Foundation for the implementation of a reading proficiency program which will benefit 10,000 students aside from training Grade I teachers on basic subject vocabulary.

The Department of Social Welfare and Development’s KALAHI CIDSS program recently turned over a one-classroom building complete with a toilet and electrical facilities, to a public high school in Malapatan town.

The province also recently received a donation of 300 colorful wooden armchairs for San Vicente National High School in Glan from Dole Philippines and 200 armchairs for Kiamba National High School from Conrado Alcantara Foundation Inc.

The province, along with Petron Philippines, has espoused an "Adopt-A-School Program," piloting it in Pangyan Elementary School in Glan, while Arcal Elementary School in Maasim was a recipient of Coca Cola’s "Little Red Schoolhouse" project.

The Growth with Equity in Mindanao (GEM) provided computer literacy and internet connection to 26 schools in the province.

Earlier, the Asian Council for People's Culture-Schools for Indigenous Knowledge and Traditions (ACPC-SIKAT) was launched in Barangay Maligang in Kiamba town.

The ACPC, a non-governmental organization, is assisting municipal governments and communities in building schools and providing trainings for those teaching Lumads (indigenous peoples) in the province.

The Department of Education’s "Family Basic Literacy Program" was also launched in December last year, making Sarangani the region's pilot area for the program.

Dominguez also acknowledged the assistance of Books for the Barrios Foundation for donating various reading materials to 40 elementary and secondary schools in the area.

I just want to share a portion of an interesting article published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer. It’s really a longer article but I’m posting only the part that pertains to education. Those who want to read the full article can click on the link provided.

There have been many good ideas on how to improve the Philippines’ quality of education. These ideas have ranged from the extensive use of IT to the construction of more classrooms and the re-training of teachers. But the info. from the World Bank study (and other similar studies performed in the past) suggest that a very large portion of Filipinos who need education the most will be excluded from such strategies moot-and-academically. More classrooms, better-trained teachers and the availability of computers might not be able to help those who simply drop out.

Those who remain in school do not fair much better. Recent studies have revealed that more than 90% of elementary and secondary students fail English, Math and Science aptitude tests.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Wide rich-poor gap big obstacle to RP growth
http://news.inq7.net/nation/index.php?index=1&story_id=50973
First posted 05:50am (Mla time) Sept 22, 2005
By Doris C. Dumlao
Inquirer News Service


INEQUALITY has become one of the biggest obstacles to rapid economic development in the Philippines, with the richest 5 percent of households accounting for nearly a third of the national income and the poorest 25 percent of households getting only 6 percent of the income, according to a World Bank report.

The poorest Filipinos "are effectively excluded from social and economic development" of the country, Joachim von Amsberg, the bank's country director, yesterday said in comments on the release of the bank's World Development Report for 2006.

An offshoot of the wide gap between the rich and the poor in the Philippines: One out of every three Filipinos aged between 6 and 24 has never been to school or has dropped out of the education system, according to a government survey released Wednesday.

The World Bank estimates that nearly half of the Philippines' 84 million people live on less than $2 (P112) a day. A recent study by the Asian Development Bank provides a regional perspective on poverty incidence: Some 1.9 billion people in Asia, or 60 percent of the total population in the region, live on less than $2 a day.

To underscore the huge income gap in the Philippines, the World Bank cited in its report a 1996 study showing that the top 10 Filipino families controlled 52.5 percent of the country's then stock market capitalization.

In comparison, the same study showed that in Indonesia the top 10 families controlled 57.7 percent of the market, Thailand 46.2 percent, Hong Kong 32.1 percent, South Korea 26.8 percent, Singapore 26.6 percent, Malaysia 24.8 percent, Taiwan 18.4 percent and Japan 2.4 percent.

EDUCATION SURVEY

The 2003 survey of the National Statistics Office on education bolstered Amsberg's view that high levels of inequality of income, assets and opportunities effectively exclude many from social and economic development.

According to the NSO survey, some 11.6 million Filipinos -- or 34 percent of the country's population with ages between 6 and 24 -- quit school prematurely or never received any formal education. One in five of these unschooled Filipinos "stated that they cannot afford the high cost of education."

Enrollment levels were lowest in the poverty-stricken ARMM where only about half of children and youth are in school or college.

Eighteen percent of children in the Philippines are not enrolled in primary school, a figure that rises to 40 percent for secondary school and 66 percent at college level.

The NSO survey also found that one in 10 Filipinos aged between 10 and 64 cannot read or write at all. Females have a higher literacy rate of 90.4 percent compared to males at 86.8 percent.

Two in 10 Filipinos are "functionally illiterate" -- they lack numerical skills and cannot perform addition, subtraction, multiplication or division. Functional illiteracy is worst among the Filipino poor, where three in 10 cannot compute or lack numerical skills.

"In education, it is the children from poor families who do not go to school and who drop out the earliest," Amsberg said.

©2005 www.inq7.net all rights reserved

Education gives us best bang for our taxes
DEMAND AND SUPPLY By Boo Chanco
The Philippine Star 10/28/2005

No matter how they try to allocate the trillion peso budget for next year, there is no argument that if we have to prioritize items in the budget (as we should), we can get the best bang for our tax money by investing on the education of our people. Even if education remains the largest single expenditure, the money being provided for in the budget is grossly inadequate to the needs.

Our neighbors in the region are investing heavily in the education of their people. I noticed during my last visit to Shanghai, the young people are more ready to talk in English. The reason why India is tops in digital outsourcing is the fact that their educational system produces pretty good engineers and other professionals, and in numbers that any Pinoy will find astounding.

While once upon a time we were considered an educational center in the region, a place where young people from all over Asia can study and earn world class college degrees, the quality of our offerings today is no longer good enough. A study commissioned by the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS) showed we lag behind ASEAN neighbors in attracting foreign students. Based on the data from the Commission on Higher Education (CHED), the Philippines is only able to attract 2,000 to 4,000 foreign students a year out of the two million students studying abroad.

Beyond the ability to earn from the increasing international trade in education, we need quality education to enhance the ability of our people to get jobs and for the country to attract investors. Even local call centers have a tough time screening prospective employees, taking in less than half of job applicants. Many of our doctors and nurses who go abroad find it difficult to quickly comprehend English test questions and instructions.

We should be investing in higher education, to give our people the high level skills needed in tomorrow’s world. But before we can even do that, we have to mind the basics, elementary and secondary education. Both have deteriorated considerably through the years.

Our public education system in the post World War 2 era had never been good enough and progressively getting worse. With the collapse of CAP, Pacific Plans and other pre-need companies, more of our people will now depend on it out of sheer necessity. Actually, over the past few years, public elementary and secondary schools have already started to feel increased enrollment, as less and less of our people are able to afford the increasing tuition fees of private schools.

During the on-going budget hearings, the House committee on appropriations expressed alarm over a DepEd report that the quality of public education is continually deteriorating, as if we didn’t know what’s so obvious. Our congressmen were told 75 percent of elementary graduates can no longer read independently, less than one percent of fourth year high school students pass the mastery test, and only 14 of 100 first graders graduate from college and 43 from high school.

"The dropout rate is alarming. For those who can graduate, they are found wanting in the reading and writing department," said Rep. Rolando Andaya Jr., committee chairman, in a hearing to review the DepEd’s proposed P118-billion budget for 2006. The DepEd reported that "for every 100 children entering Grade 1, 15 of them would not reach Grade 2." That means, the next generation would be unable to escape the clutches of poverty.

Andaya said what is "more alarming and one that sets the Philippines apart from other countries," is the failure of more than half of those who enter high school to finish the course. And those who graduate are unable to pass national standardized test to measure their competence and skills.

According to the DepEd, only one in five graduating elementary students showed "mastery in all required competencies" based on a test given last May while for high school students, less "than one percent" had mastery in basic subjects. Three out of 10 Grade 6 students and six out of 10 fourth year students showed `no mastery’ at all.

DepEd traced the reasons for "poor achievement in Science and Math to, among others, poor English reading skills." One other reason for the low achievement test scores is the quality of teachers. For example, 73 percent of those who teach Physics are non-Physics majors. This is case of the blind leading the blind.

The congressmen who are now deliberating on the DepEd budget sound sufficiently impressed by the urgency of the problem and the need to support DepEd with the proper budget. But there are many demands on our meager resources. Even the Armed Forces want to hire and equip more soldiers and I suppose, get going on their so-called modernization program.

In the light of our financial difficulties, I think we have no choice but to tell the Armed Forces spending money on education at this time makes more sense. Ignorance and poverty are the worst national security concerns of the nation today that cannot be remedied by guns and bullets.

However, DepEd must assure us that any massive infusion of tax money on education would go into actual programs in the field and not to butter up the large bureaucracy at DepEd’s head office. Teachers who are shuffling papers in DepEd offices must be brought back to the classrooms, after sufficient re-training.

A lot had been achieved by the late Secretary Raul Roco and recently, by Butch Abad by way of minimizing corruption at DepEd. Hopefully too, whatever money we put into the DepEd budget goes into educating our youth and not lining the pockets of the usual grafters in and out of DepEd.