Back in the good old days, a good education was simply the 3 Rs: readin’, ‘ritin’, ‘rithmetic. Nowadays, one needs a 4th R to get a good education: ‘rots of ‘ard cash.
This stricture applies to many parents who’d rather have their children study in expensive private schools—if they could afford the tuition—and to government which needs ‘rots of ‘ard cash to run the public school system.
But finding a lot of that 4th R to really improve education is a Herculean labor for a government swamped by a total outstanding debt of P3.4 trillion (78% of GDP in 2003) that eats up a quarter of the budget as payment. In other words, for every peso collected from taxes, 25 centavos goes to debt payment.
Pres. Gloria Arroyo, however, has set aside P135 billion for education out of the P908 billion national budget for 2005. Education continues to receive the largest sector share of the budget, as it did in 2004, which is a good indication of this government’s priorities.
Also in this year’s budget is an additional P1 billion for the construction of classrooms in areas with severe classroom deficiencies. Some P600 million will go to the maintenance expenses of schools to cope with the projected increase in students and to improve the quality of education. An additional P1 billion has also been included for the hiring of new teachers.
For 2005, Pres. Arroyo said the government will focus education on standardizing classroom instruction; closing the classroom gap; upgrading the Math, Science and English curriculum and providing computers in every high school.
Education’s 15% share of tax pesos might seem huge, but as the Business Journal discovered when talking to Department of Education (DepEd) Secretary Florencio Abad and Atty. Julito Vitriolo, Deputy Executive Director of the Commission on Higher Education (CHED), a lot more cash is needed to fix Philippine education. A whole ‘rot more.
Improving college education
“If money were no object, CHED would probably need P50 billion to do a good job,” said Vitriolo, who coordinates operations of the CHED Secretariat.
That’s about 50 times CHED’s budget for this year (P1.1 billion) and 45% of DepEd’s current P111 billion budget. It also starkly illustrates the magnitude of the problems facing tertiary education that require fixing.
Established in 1994, CHED governs both private and public higher education institutions and degree granting programs in all tertiary education institutions. It develops higher education by upgrading quality through different interventions and by aggressively monitoring these interventions.
CHED oversees some 1,600 colleges and universities nationwide. Of these, 111 are state colleges and universities; the rest are private schools. CHED is administratively attached to the Office of the President. CHED employs some 600 people. On the other hand, DepEd looks after elementary and high school education, both public and private.
Vitriolo said a huge part of this P50 billion “wish ko lang” (“I wish”) budget would go to expanding CHED’s flagship Centers of Excellence/Development (COE/COD) program.
This program, which eats up some P200 million of CHED’s funds, aims to raise the quality of undergraduate and graduate education to levels comparable to international standards. CHED sees the 260 COE/CODs as indicators of higher education quality. In theory, the existence of COE/CODs is also expected to help raise the quality of schools in their locales.
Having more money would also enable CHED to expand a scholarship program that assisted just 40,000 of 2.5 million college students in 2002. There were some 60,000 scholars in 2000 and 45,000 in 2001. CHED credits funding cuts for the drop in the numbers of its Student Financial Assistance Program scholars.
“More money will also allow us to train more teachers, train more education managers such as deans and school presidents and improve our monitoring and evaluation,” Vitriolo pointed out.
Board exams
Taken together, these interventions are all geared towards improving the quality of college students and the teachers responsible for their educational growth. The ideal outcome of all these interventions would be marked improvements in the results of the different board examinations. As it stands now, the board exams are the only visible measures of the quality of Philippine tertiary education.
Vitriolo, however, noted that quality hasn’t improved dramatically in the board exams compared to the effort expended on it.
“To be frank, the results of the board exams don’t justify what has been put into it,” said Vitriolo.
CHED data shows that the average passing score in national board or licensure exams in 1999-2000 was 44%, up slightly from 42% in 1994-1995. It also reveals that courses with the highest passing rates were landscape architecture (67% from 1994-2000) and health related fields (medicine, pharmacy and nursing).
In contrast, accounting and customs administration had the lowest passing rates (17% for accounting and 9.9% for customs administration from 1994-2000). CHED uses 40 board exams as its basis for evaluating the quality of higher education and individual schools. Its goal is to raise the average passing rate to 49% by 2004.
A major culprit in these less than glittering results is a budget that severely limits interventions that could improve student and teacher quality.
“Maliit ‘yon,” (“It’s small”) said Vitriolo of CHED’s P1.1 billion budget, noting that P500 million of this amount is being spent to support 40,000 scholars.
Vitriolo, however, revealed that other non-budgetary sources added at least P1.5 to P2 billion more to the CHED budget. These special accounts include the travel tax, professional regulatory fees and the Lotto, from which CHED receives a small percentage.
He does believe that throwing money at the problem of improving the quality of college education will help a lot, but won’t solve all of CHED’s problems.
“If we had all the money we need, many problems would go away,” he said.
“In terms of input, we could address problems in training, research and development. As for outcomes (the board exams), I can’t guarantee. More money might not make a difference. It is problematic whether the results of the board exams will improve.”
He hesitates to pin the blame on any organization since all the organizations and institutions involved in education are doing what they can with what little they have. But the quality of college graduates also depends on how these graduates did in elementary and high school.
Not the basic solution
Judging from recent remarks by DepEd Secretary Abad, however, significantly improving the quality of higher education might cost a lot more than Vitriolo’s dream budget.
Although he hesitated to give a concrete figure, Abad told the Business Journal that if they had their ideal budget, DepEd’s priority areas of spending would be the institutionalization of a universal pre-schooling system; school-feeding programs; intensive readership programs; teacher training; principal training and filling resource gaps.
“The education sector does need money, but money is not the basic solution to improving basic education,” Abad noted.
“We are a poor country in a fiscal crisis—this is a reality. But if we make this situation an excuse for poor performance, we will never be able to improve. We cannot wait for the money to come. We’ll end up waiting forever!
“We must work with whatever we have now. We have to manage our little resources efficiently and effectively in order to turn this education crisis around.
“And it is possible. Let me tell you, there are only two absolutely crucial ingredients in the education process: the teacher and the student. As long as you have a good teacher and a willing student, learning will take place.”
In support of this observation, Abad revealed that the majority of top-scoring schools in the recent National Achievement Test (NAT) come not from wealthy cities but from poor rural areas
“Out of the 5,000 public high schools in the country, the top one with a score of nearly 87% was a tiny school located on a mountaintop in Northern Samar: Lope de Vega National High School.
“Also, schools located in the NCR get hundreds of millions of pesos from their local governments. Yet not one division in the NCR scored higher than 75% on the NAT. This just goes to show that you may have all the resources in the world, but still not achieve. And you may have nothing at all, but achievement can still be possible.
“What it really takes to create a good school is a supportive community where officials, principals, teachers, and parents work together for their children’s education.
“We have to make the most of what we have now in order to turn the education crisis around. Besides, everyone already wants to help education. If we can produce real results for now, given our limitations, I am sure that even more support will come in. Everyone will want to give to education. But for now we should just focus on producing results.”
Other solutions to improving education quality are the addition of Grade 7 and a 5th year in high school. Both options have drawn heavy flak from parents and teachers, who will shoulder the burden of these new impositions. Abad said DepEd will retain to the existing set-up—for now.
“We agree that the Philippine’s current 10-year education system is too short and we support the idea of adding an additional 7th grade and 5th year. Unfortunately, adding two more years to our cycle will cost money—for more teachers, more materials, more classrooms, everything. Until our budget for education is increased, we have to stick with the ten years. However, we will aim for a 12-year cycle in the long run.”
89% to salaries
Today, however, DepEd contents itself with trying to maximize the resources it has in order to produce results.
“While the DepED’s budget may be high compared to the budgets of other government departments, our P111 billion is still not enough to meet our resource gaps,” Abad said.
“89% of our budget goes to salaries, while 14% goes to operating expenses and seven percent goes to bridging the resource gap in terms of teachers, classrooms, textbooks, furniture and the like. We need to build an additional 44,000 classrooms, but we only have enough money to build 6,000.
“We need to hire 27,000 more teachers, but we can only pay 10,000 more. Our budget may grow by two percent every year, but this is not fast enough to catch up with the six percent inflation rate and two percent population increase.”
Abad said that this June, DepEd will implement a two-shift policy in schools thereby decreasing the lack of classrooms by 39,000. DepEd is also implementing the ESC, a program that partly subsidizes the tuition fees of public school students who opt to enroll in private schools.
“We are also urging local governments to be more aggressive in collecting their Special Education Funds, which can add an additional P9 billion to LGU funds for education. We are also tapping social capital: last year we launched the Brigada Eskwela program, which mobilized parents and communities across the country to generate P750 million worth of man-hours and materials for the repair of our classrooms.”
DepEd is also tapping the private sector through its Adopt-a-School program, which has also generated hundreds of millions of pesos in donated buildings. The Sagip Eskwela program launched last January has since raised P114 million for the rehabilitation of schools that were damaged by typhoons last year.
“Schools First Initiative”
DepEd’s current solution to arrest the deteriorating quality of elementary and high school education is the “Schools First Initiative.” Basically, the Schools First Initiative empowers communities to manage their schools. As Abad put it:
“A problem at the DepEd for many years was that the management of schools has always been too centralized. The Central Office cannot be well informed about the unique needs of each and every one of our 41,000 schools.
“It is actually the teachers, parents, principals, and local officials who know the real score about what their own schools need to improve. They are also the ones who are directly concerned with how well their children are learning in school.”
In the meantime, regional and division offices of DepEd will provide the necessary support to schools and monitoring services. The Central Office will take charge of policy, standards setting, budgeting and monitoring. Central Office will do the steering while individual communities will do the rowing.
Abad also called on private schools to help decongest crowded public schools by helping parents through education service contracting or through other more equitable tuition arrangements.
Work together in educational reform
Abad told private educators that a crisis in Philippine education does exist and that the only way to solve it would be for private and public schools to work together in educational reform.
He emphasized that the wide gap in quality between private and public schools might, in fact, have increased since 1997 “to the disadvantage of the 17 million students in our public schools.”
He noted that the Trends in Mathematics Survey conducted in 2003 in which both private and public schools took part showed the Philippines as 41st among 45 countries in high school math, and 42nd for high school science.
In the 2004 high school readiness test, only 0.6 percent scored 75 percent or above, equivalent to 8,000 students out of 1.2 million examinees. Abad said the competency of these students is only at the Grade 4 level in public schools.
Abad observed that only 32 out of 100 students graduate from high school. Other data shows that only 20 high school graduates will go on to college with half this number graduating.
Teacher quality is also a matter for concern. Only 19% of public school teachers scored 75% or better in the English self-assessment test for teachers.
“That’s no more than 10,000 out of around 51,000 teachers,” said Abad.
“That means some 41,000 of our teachers have inadequate proficiency in the English language”.
While these grim numbers might give one pause, DepEd also sees them as challenges amenable to some solution by more funding. And any success in improving the quality of high school graduates is bound to impact positively on the quality of college graduates.
But again, attaining this decades-old aim will need more of the 4th R than the government can afford. Which brings us back to the basic question: “How does one improve the quality of Philippine education?”
It’s a chicken and egg thing.
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