GBF’s commitment to education

The Gokongwei Brothers Foundation (GBF) is truly committed to helping improve education in the country with its latest partnership with Khan Academy, a non-profit educational organization, to help bring global best practices to Filipino learners.

The partnership was formally announced to the press last Wednesday with members of the GBF in attendance, including Lance Gokongwei, Robina Gokongwei-Pe, Lisa Gokongwei-Cheng and several other family members of the foundation.

GBF, the philanthropic arm of the Gokongwei Group, is the largest private sector provider of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) scholarships in the country.

According to Lisa Gokongwei-Cheng, managing director of GBF, there is a crisis in Philippine education. She cited the recent release by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development which showed the Philippines’ near-bottom ranking in the first PISA creativity assessment administered to 15-year-olds in 64 countries.

Similarly, in December last year, she pointed out, the country’s performance in the PISA rankings for math, science, and reading tests showed the same alarming results – not much different from our performance three years prior when the country first joined the PISA testing.

Furthermore, she cited, the Education Commission 2 convened for the purpose of understanding the nature of this crisis to aid legislation pointed out several concerns in a report titled “Miseducation: the Failed System of Philippine Education.” The report identified 28 priorities that needed to be addressed in order to set the country back on track.

These priorities included very basic needs such as feeding our youth – one of the most stunted in the world, financing early childhood development, building infrastructure, providing learning resources like textbooks to students and helping overworked and untrained teachers through skills development.

Thus, according to Mrs. Cheng,  “the GBF’s core mission: To build the future through education – remains as relevant today as when GBF was founded 32 years ago by brothers John, Henry, Johnson and James.”

Lance Gokongwei, for his part, added that “the objective of making quality education accessible to all is one that the GBF has always shared. GBF’s goal is to have a lasting impact on education as part of our contribution to nation building. We continue to educate our next generation so they have the proper skills necessary when they enter the workforce to help contribute to our nation’s progress.”

The partnership between the GBF and the Sunshine Charitable Foundation to form Khan Academy Philippines, its first international franchise, will allow Khan Academy’s content and lessons to be localized and align it with the DepEd curriculum through a local team of Filipinos.

Thus, Lance said, “This is another way the GBF can give back to our nation’s learners through education.”

Khan Academy’s global education technology platform, founded by financial analyst Sal Khan in 2008, is focused on closing learning gaps and providing differentiated learning across various subjects. It’s been quickly adopted in different countries as an effective tool for learning.

The education technology platform is available free online and can be easily downloaded by anyone.

“We are so thrilled to be able to bring this global technology here to elevate learning in the Philippines by providing 21st century skills,” according to Geraldine Acuna-Sunshine, CEO of Khan Academy Philippines.

In an interview, Ms. Sunshine said that a strong partnership with institutions such as the GBF and with the Department of Education are crucial for the expansion of Khan Academy throughout the country.

Thankfully, Ms. Sunshine said, she is already well acquainted and has touched base with newly appointed Education Secretary Sonny Angara.

In August last year, Khan Academy was launched in 34 schools (30 public and four private) across nine cities, namely Quezon City, Mandaluyong, Manila, Marikina, Makati, Pasig, Pasay, Las Piñas and Dumaguete City.

The pilot began with onboarding math teachers by training them on how to use the platform as an effective teaching aid, strategies on growth mindset, mastery learning and student progress monitoring.  The teachers then learned to create their own virtual Khan Academy classrooms and guide their students on how to navigate grade 4 math lessons in the platform during their weekly Khan Academy schedule.

According to Khan Academy data, to have a positive learning impact, students must spend at least 18 hours per school year (about 30 minutes per week) of engaged, active learning on the platform. To encourage use, participating schools employed various techniques such as dedicated “Khan Academy time” in their schedules, dedicated WiFi use for the platform, and providing one device per student at a time for better learning experience. Parents were also oriented and included in the process to ensure that they could support their children’s use of the platform.

The pilot launch for the school year 2023-2024 included 71 math teachers, 3,250 students and 600 parents with overall positive feedback from participants. Teachers acknowledged that the tool assisted them in developing lesson mastery, while students had fun doing the exercises and parents saw an increase in their children’s interest in learning math. The Khan Academy team also saw a trend in increased skills mastery from students who used the platform consistently.

For the incoming SY 2024-2025, Khan Academy Philippines plans to expand to more schools across the country and to include more DepEd-aligned elementary math courses.  Khan Academy Philippines also plans to introduce its AI-powered teaching assistant, Khanmigo, and propose teacher certification courses for approval by the National Educators Academy of the Philippines (NEAP).

All these efforts are geared toward the goal of reaching one million learners by the end of 2026.