Brigada Eskwela: Essays on Philippine Education

BRIGADA

ESKWELA

ESSAYS ON

PHILIPPINE

EDUCATION

JUAN MIGUEL LUZ

Copyright to this digital edition © 2011 by

Juan Miguel Luz

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DEDICATION

To my mother,

Carmen Montinola Luz,

one of the first trained social workers in the country

and

my mother-in-law,

Magdalena M. Mediodia,

a public school teacher for a quarter of a century.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

FOREWORD

ASSESSING EDUCATION:

WHY HAVE WE FAILED?

CHAPTER ONE Why are Filipino Kids Not Learning?

CHAPTER TWO A Nation of Non-Readers

CHAPTER THREE Five Disconnects In Philippine Education

CHAPTER FOUR Disconnect 1: We Are A Two-Class Education System

CHAPTER FIVE Disconnect 2: Teachers Are Subsidizing Basic Education Through Low Pay

CHAPTER SIX Disconnect 3: Filipino Children Are Starting School Too Late

CHAPTER SEVEN Disconnect 4: We Are Becoming A Nation of Male Underachievers

CHAPTER EIGHT Disconnect 5: Muslim Filipino Children Are Getting Only Half An Education

PROGRAM REFORM:

WHAT DO WE NEED TO DO?

CHAPTER NINE To Be Competitive, We Need a 12-Year Basic Education Cycle

CHAPTER TEN Five Reasons For An Expanded High School Program

CHAPTER ELEVEN The Case For A Re-Engineered Technical–Vocational Curriculum in Public High School

CHAPTER TWELVE Brigada Eskwela: The Power of Numbers

CHAPTER THIRTEEN An English-First Policy Will Hurt Learning

CHAPTER FOURTEEN School Feeding, Not Rice Distribution

CHAPTER FIFTEEN There is A Real Classroom Shortage in This Country

CHAPTER SIXTEEN A Strong Private School System Will Strengthen the Public School System

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Poor Quality Textbooks Have No Place in Our Schools

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN From Good Health to Great Sports

GOVERNANCE:

MANAGING REFORMS

CHAPTER NINETEEN Managing Governance Reform in a Large Bureaucracy

CHAPTER TWENTY Reflections on Institutional Reform at the Department of Education

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE Delayed, Re-Enacted Budgets Hurt Education Most

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO Education in the Arroyo Years: Plugging Leaks, Losing Track of Quality

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE A Reform Agenda For Teachers: Teacher Quality

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR A Reform Agenda For Teachers: Teacher Welfare

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE GSIS Should Treat Teachers With Respect

THE EXTRA EFFORT

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX Teaching Values in a Dysfunctional Environment

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN Needed: Strong Local School Boards

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT Needed: Education Local Chief Executives

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

    FOREWORD    

Thirty years ago, I taught high school mathematics at a mission school of the De La Salle Christian Brothers in Barangay Villamonte, Bacolod City on the island of Negros. Villamonte then was commonly referred to as Barrio Obrero or the Workers’ Village and it was home to sugar mill workers, jeepney drivers, labanderas (laundry women) and the occasional criminal hiding from the law. In short, it was a working class settlement of low-income families.

Villamonte was laid out from land set aside by the then-ruling oligarchic family of Negros, the Montelibanos; hence Villamonte, short for Villa Montelibano. The entire subdivision was formerly a sugar cane plantation and was a major supplier of cane for the Bacolod-Murcia Milling Company located at the edge of town. (When I first arrived in Bacolod by boat, the flat landscape was punctuated by three structures that stuck out: the San Sebastian Cathedral in downtown Bacolod, the seven-story skyscraper that was the Philippine National Bank, and the two smokestacks of the Bacolod-Murcia Milling Company or BMMC, as it was called in shorthand.)

I was a third-year high school Geometry teacher and a fourth-year English Creative Writing instructor. Each of my classes were around 40-45 in size—easily manageable—and very active. I was the homeroom advisor of 3-C (Chile), a group of young fifteen-year-old boys and girls who weren’t the smartest in the school but also not the laggards either. Years later, I see a number of them at the annual homecoming always held a few days after Christmas. Many of them have become professionals: a bank officer, an accountant, an insurance company executive, a marketing man, and even, a coast guard captain. They are successful in their own way and happy.

The Villamonte of the early 1980s was nowhere near as middle income as it is today. Back then, many of the families attending St. Joseph’s High School worked extremely hard to pay for the tuition, low as it was compared to other private schools in Bacolod City and elsewhere. Many of the families at St. Joe’s sent their children to public elementary schools, including the one next door (Corazon L. Montelibano Elementary School), but put them in St. Joe’s for the religious education they could get from the Christian Brothers. This entailed a good deal of sacrifice because there is tuition at St. Joe’s versus the no-tuition policy in public high schools. Scholarships were extremely limited, so the practice at St. Joe’s to make tuition affordable to its low-income stakeholders was to offer tuition discounts for families with two or more children in the school and/or to allow for tuition to be paid monthly to help out a family’s cash flow.

As is the practice in private schools to ensure that it was taking in tuition to pay for the operation of the school, there was a no payment no exam permit policy. No exam taken meant no way to move on to the next quarter of school which effectively translated into taking a leave of absence, if not dropping out outright. And if the leave were to take place after the second quarter of the school year, then it meant repeating the grade level the next school year.

Every quarter just before exam time, I would be visited by at least a dozen parents asking for consideration. Consideration often meant my having to advance the monthly payment so that their son or daughter could take the quarterly exams. And in more than one case, I had to write-off these advances.

There were many things I learned about household coping mechanisms from my one year at St. Joseph’s. In the third-year high school classes I taught, I came across more than a few siblings of different ages. In fact, in all of the third year class there was only one set of twins but many other pairs of siblings of different ages, even up to three years apart. What was going on? It turned out that families sent children to school based on whether a particular year was a good one or a bad one in terms of income. In good years, all school-age children could be sent to school. In bad years, the children would take turns. First, one sibling this year; the next year, another. Thus, one or two siblings could in fact be in the same class or year level, the younger one catching up with the older one.

There were also coping mechanisms on the part of teachers who were receiving very low salaries at that time (and still do). Thirty years ago, I was single and a new graduate. My pay as a first year teacher was all of 690 pesos a month of which fifteen percent went to taxes, twenty percent to the rent of a room in the barangay, another twenty five percent to paying a fellow teacher’s wife (and a neighbor) to provide three meals every day, about ten percent for someone to do my laundry, and whatever was left for a little entertainment with fellow teachers. Teachers who were on-board for a few years with the school were making 100 pesos more than I was, and the school principal who was serving his nineteenth year at St. Joe’s was all of 200 pesos above my salary level. Many of these teachers had families of their own and other obligations. The typical coping mechanism was to take on salary loans against salary deductions or worse, to borrow from loan sharks. There was little they could do with belt-tightening because there just wasn’t enough of a salary to tighten up on. Yet, these were very happy people who took great pride in their own work and their teaching and who would spend long hours after school and on Saturdays to make sure kids were not falling behind.

This is, in part, what the story of Philippine education is like. What I experienced thirty years ago as a new college graduate teaching high school math in the province is still very much the case in our education system today. For the bulk of our schools today, whether private or public, the story and the demographics are similar. In recent years, the average amount spent in our public schools per pupil or student has been around P6,500 per year. The average tuition per student spent in the private schools under the GASTPE (Government Assistance to Students and Teachers in Private Education) education service contracting program was P7,000. The difference: the government paid for the former, families paid for the latter.

What I saw then has shaped many of my own thoughts about education today. These thoughts came to a head for me when I had the opportunity to serve a three-and-a-half year stint as undersecretary in the Department of Education. But instead of being in charge of a classroom full of children, I was tasked with looking over the finances and administration of a public school system with over 42,000 schools and close to 500,000 principals and teachers in 180+ school divisions.

Looking at how the system was performing, or under-performing, as the case has been, many questions percholated in my mind. Why was the entire system not delivering on the promise of quality education? Despite the largest budgetary share in government, were we spending as much for education as we should be? Why is it that there are good teachers and even good schools, but these are isolated islands of excellence that do not translate into system-wide solutions? How do good teachers and good schools succeed in a milieu of lack of support? Why is excellence so elusive a goal in Philippine education?

While the problems in the system have been stubbornly persistent over the last three decades, there is room for hope. The St. Joseph High School story is one such story. Since its establishment in 1960 when Villamonte was Barrio Obrero, St. Joe’s has educated thousands of students who have gone on to be successful in life. And the net impact of this has been the transformation of Villamonte from a poor blue-collar worker community to one that is middle-class in standing today. Education was a major driver in this transformation as it should be in any developing democracy.

The essays in this book come from the many questions raised during and after my Department of Education days. They were written as part of an effort to inform the public about what our education system needs or to vent a degree of anger at leaders and others who use education for their own purposes and to argue that this is wrong.

The book is organized into four parts. The first asks why the system has performed so poorly over the years. The second looks at reform and what needs to be done. The third section focuses on governance and how to manage reform. The last takes a look at extra efforts done by other education stakeholders.

The questions need to be continually asked not only because quality education is a never-ending pursuit, but more importantly, because getting our education system to perform as a system has been elusive and a persistent shortcoming all of these years.

Juan Miguel Luz

July, 2011

Assessing Education:

Why Have We Failed?

CHAPTER ONE

Why are Filipino Kids Not Learning?

DESPITE EDUCATION HAVING the largest share of the national budget, national achievement test results reflect, in general, the low level of learning on the part of most Filipino public school children. Why do our children do so badly in national achievement tests and in international comparative survey tests?

A Tale of Three Tests

High School IV National Achievement Test (NAT). In March 2004, all high school fourth year (HS IV) students were given a National Achievement Test in English, Science and Math as a way of determining their levels of preparation for either university or the world of work.¹

Only 6.8% of the seniors tested passed the English test with a score of at least 75% of the test questions answered correctly. These seniors scored higher for Math with 12.9% passing, but scored terribly in Science with less than 1 in 100 (0.7%) scoring 75% or better on that portion of the test. Overall, only 2.1% of all high school seniors passed the NAT. If the cumulative passing score for the test was set at 50% correct, only one-third (33%) of all seniors would have met the grade. Overall, the average score for English was 50.1%, for Science 36.8% and for Mathematics 46.2% versus the benchmark passing grade of 75%.

High School Readiness Test (HSRT). In 2002, 2003 and 2004, the Department tested all first year high school (HS I) freshmen students in the same three subject areas. This HSRT (called the National Diagnostic Test in 2002 and 2003) tested over 1.3 million students aged 12-13 years who had graduated from elementary school.

The three years of testing revealed similar results. In the 2004 HSRT, less than one percent (0.52%) managed to score 75% or better in all three subject areas. If a 50% mean percentage score (MPS)² were the passing mark, only 7.4% of the incoming freshmen would have passed. In all three test years, the median score was a low 30% of all questions answered correctly. In the English test, only 18 out of every 100 test-takers passed, in Science, 10 out of 100, and even less in Math, 8 out of 100.

What was the passing grade for at least half of the students entering HS I? This would be around 34% MPS in English, 25-29% MPS for mathematics and 30-34% MPS for science, depending on the