Why NCCE was scrapped

The reason the EDCOM-created National Coordinating Council for Education (NCCE) never got off the ground is something all managers know: if everyone is in charge, nobody is in charge. By making CHED, DepEd, and TESDA equal partners in education, the NCCE failed to take into account the hierarchical (some say, dictatorial) nature of Philippine government entities. Government people always look to the boss for directions.

For instance, when he was DepEd Secretary, Raul Roco convened a large group of school principals and told them pointblank, “I am now empowering you. You can decide on your own about matters that have to do with your teachers and your school buildings.” The principals then asked him in return, “Sir, can you put that down in a memo?”

Roco then went on to tell one of his favorite stories about the prisoner who had been in handcuffs while being taken to court. In court, the judge commanded the guards to remove the handcuffs. Even without the handcuffs, the prisoner kept his hands together, as though they were still in handcuffs.

The first function given to Presidential Assistant Mona Dumlao-Valisno by Executive Order 632 is “to serve as the [point person] for trans-subsectoral consultations on cross-cutting policies and programs.” Although management theorists might question how a staff function can have line authority, the order from President Arroyo is clear: Valisno can now, with Arroyo’s blessing, order CHED, DepEd, and TESDA around.

That is the only way to ensure that the three government bodies get their act together. Someone has to be on top, and since the President herself has no time to look personally into education, she has delegated her power to her Presidential Assistant for Education. (That, by the way, neatly solves the management issue of staff and line functions.)

Remember the title of Executive Order 632: “Mandating a Presidential Assistant to Assess, Plan and Monitor the Entire Educational System.” The executive order is the first step towards returning to the good old days when only one person was on top of the educational system. Since it is about time anyway to review EDCOM, Congress must now take the cue and see if trifocalization (as it is called in Philippine English), which seemed like a good idea at the time, has outlived its usefulness.

LANGUAGE MATTERS: Here is something from the Rational Outsourcing Blog about why we do not need to be proficient in English to capture the bulk of the BPO market. The entry is about China: “Some [Chinese] entrepreneurs are adopting very interesting process innovations to address the English problem. One leading Chinese BPO splits up every document into its smallest component parts. Thus, one of their operators only processes the ‘Social Security number’ field of every loan application while another processes only the ‘employer’ field. At this level of granularity, the skill required is not really English language skill, but rather symbol identification and transcription skill. The Chinese written language contains more than 3500 characters and thus the Chinese are exceptionally good at symbol identification and transcription. Of course, this solution only works for low-end data entry work because higher-order tasks such as Knowledge Process Outsourcing or even advanced BPO activities such as insurance claims adjudication can not be easily broken into minute components. However, low-end data entry work constitutes the majority of Business Process Outsourcing work today and most Chinese entrepreneurs would be happy to capture a significant proportion of this market away from India.” (my italics)

“WORDS OF THE DAY” (English/Filipino) for next week’s elementary school classes: Aug. 28 Tuesday: 1. red/iba, 2. bamboo/ibabaw, 3. camia/ihaw, 4. cedar/ilang, 5. coffee/imik, 6. asparagus/ilaya; Aug. 29 Wednesday: 1. fine/ihi, 2. speak/ilag, 3. deal/inom, 4. chapter/imot, 5. either/itaas, 6. remember/imbay; Aug. 30 Thursday: 1. sea/ilaw, 2. make/inday, 3. berry/ingat, 4. balete/isda, 5. almond/itsa, 6. mabolo/iyon; Aug. 31 Friday: 1. see/ilong, 2. cactus/ina, 3. butterfly/init, 4. nangka/iyak, 5. avocado/isip, 6. business/itik. The numbers after the dates indicate grade level. The dates refer to the official calendar for public elementary schools. For definitions of the words in Filipino, consult UP Diksiyonaryong Filipino.