EDITORIAL – Miseducating the public

Now you have an idea why students in public schools have an acute lack of quality textbooks. The Sandiganbayan has sentenced to 10 years in prison two education officials for the diversion of P118 million in public funds meant for the production and distribution of textbooks. Caridad Miranda and Artemio Mendoza, ge-neral manager and finance officer, respectively, of the Instructional Materials Corp., were sentenced toge-ther with Elsa Reyes, president of Eurotrust Capital Corp.

The Sandiganbayan found that the two officials, whose agency is attached to the Department of Education, gave Reyes blank checks to invest public funds in government securities without authorization from the agency’s board. The investment was never recovered. Records showed the uncollected funds from Eurotrust amounted to P571,028. With interests, the amount ballooned to P118 million.

This is not the only scandal that has erupted in connection with textbooks. In the previous administration, a re-lative of Joseph Estrada was accused of influence peddling at the education department in connection with a textbook deal. Then there have been numerous reports of textbooks riddled with factual and grammatical errors.

This sorry situation has aggrava-ted the lack of textbooks in public schools. Unscrupulous education officials conspire with equally unscrupulous businessmen to produce substandard textbooks that merely wor-sen the deterioration of the quality of public education. Teachers, many of them underqualified, often cannot even spot the errors in textbooks issued by their department.

This situation has gone on for so long because no one has been punished for carelessness, neglect or plain greed that leads to miseducation in the public school system. The conviction of Miranda and Mendoza together with Reyes may finally start discouraging corruption in the production of textbooks. But the warning will be louder if the Sandiganbayan can do its job faster. The fund diversion occurred from March 1989 to September 1990. It took 14 years before a conviction was handed down, and the case can still be appealed. Are the convicts still around for their punishment? They could have skipped town 14 years ago with the missing funds. A fugitive can sneak out of this country within 14 days, or even 14 hours.

The government should send a strong message that messing with public education is a crime, and the guilty must pay dearly for it.