Actually, the problem is with the Duterte administration. Malacanang, DepEd, and DOF successfully bullied the World Bank into taking down from its website the report on our failing education sector and apologizing.
That isn’t going to fix anything. They say the country was shamed. They demanded an apology from the World Bank. They claim the data used by the World Bank are dated, but they did not offer new data to refute the WB report.
Pathetic. Yan ang nakakahiya. They must be shaking their heads in disbelief and disgust at the World Bank. DepEd Secretary Briones, Harry Roque and unfortunately, even Sonny Dominguez are denying the obvious.
According to news reports, the DOF said Dominguez told the World Bank that the report “does not reflect current realities” as well as “has the effect of misleading the public and causing undue reputational risk to the Philippine education sector.”
Come on, Sec Sonny. You are better than that. So, what is current reality? Show us fresh data. Surely things have not improved enough between now and the time covered by the data in the World Bank.
The World Bank owes the Duterte government no apology for doing its job. It is the Duterte administration that owes the Filipino public an apology for being onion-skinned about a problem they have neglected and is now a crisis.
In fairness to the Duterte administration, the deterioration of our education sector happened across several administrations from the Marcos era through the EDSA administrations to today. The Duterte administration should not carry all of the blame.
But the first step in solving a problem is recognizing there is one. Instead of castigating the World Bank for supposed breach of protocol, Secretary Briones should have admitted we are in deep sh-t and urged all segments of society to unite in helping deal with the crisis.
The problem with the DepEd is it is in denial. DepEd shouldn’t be. DepEd knows there is a serious problem because it has been doing standardized tests called national achievement tests almost every year in basic education, public and private.
But DepEd doesn’t make test results public to make the schools systems accountable. Indeed, they do not even share test scores with a government think tank that does policy research to help in governance.
Only international tests like PISA and TIMSS make their data available publicly and DepEd hates that. They have been threatening to stop cooperating with the international tests because they know how bad the results will be.
To the credit of the current education officials, they decided to participate in PISA in 2018, our first time, and resumed participation in TIMSS in 2019. The last time we participated in TIMSS was 2003. DepEd should be required by law to participate so we know how well or badly we are doing.
I understand that researchers from the think tank have been begging DepEd for test data. They argue that full disclosure of performance of schools is in the public interest, but they have not been successful in convincing DepEd. The excuse of DepEd for not sharing test data is the privacy law.
That’s not a valid objection. The researchers are asking for anonymized data to help them understand better the performance of our school system. Anonymized test scores do not violate the privacy law and cannot be treated as state secrets.
I am told DepEd is insisting on regional or national tables, which researchers think are not very useful in analyzing school performance.
“It is relatively easy to get school characteristics (enrollment, class size, number of teachers, classrooms, desks, textbooks), but not test scores,” someone commented in one of my Viber groups.
Students in public and private schools take the same tests. Those in private, autonomous schools in urban areas scored higher in PISA, and the performance gap with public schools is large.
Students in private independent schools outperform public school students by 60 score points in reading, 52 score points in math, and 54 score points in science. Private independent schools are those that receive less than 50 percent of core funding from government agencies.
Comparing the proficiency of 15-year-olds in reading - Level 2 and above, it’s bad across the board. But there is a higher percentage of 15-year-olds from private independent schools meeting global proficiency than those from public and private, but government dependent, schools.
The problem with DepEd is that it is a big lumbering bureaucracy that seems to have forgotten its mission of educating our children. They are more concerned with their bureaucratic procedures and the money to be made by producing text books and learning modules that are not very good.
It is unfortunate that education is not a prime topic for discussion in public fora. Maybe it is because most of the people who run our government don’t really care about the public school system. Their kids go to private schools and so do most of their friends.
So, another Viber friend observed, the public school system, which is in general not an election issue, is an afterthought of policy. Ganyan na talaga yan.
But it has not always been this bad. My father and his generation benefited from good public education in the early to mid-1900s. But like everything our post- independence government touched, it has deteriorated through the years of having our government run like hell by the geniuses we elect.
Here are some worrisome statistics: overall average passing rate in the Board Licensure Examination for Professional Teachers (BLEPT) from 2009-2019 is 28 percent for elementary and 37 percent for secondary; in junior high school, students move up despite having low proficiency (only one percent are proficient in math, only three percent proficient in English, only one percent proficient in science; only 13 percent proficient in Filipino, etc.).
Is it alright for us that most of our young people have nothing to look forward to but jobs as domestic helpers, construction laborers, and ship crew members? That’s what it will be unless we work double, triple time, to improve outcomes through good public education.
The future of this country depends on a well-educated future generation. Right now, that future looks dim.
Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is bchanco@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @boochanco