Still Rizal's fight

Editorial (Business Mirror, June 20, 2011)

ALL his life, our nation’s hero Jose Rizal fought against an unjust system that deprived Filipinos of the right to good education. He knew what good education meant, the difference it can make in the life of a person and a country.

If Rizal were alive today, he probably would still be fighting.

Our public schools are plagued by a lack of facilities, qualified teachers and an atrocious dropout rate. The Department of Education said that despite all its recent efforts to fill the glaring foundational gaps, there is still a shortage of 103, 612 elementary- and secondary-school teachers; 66,800 classrooms, 2,573,212 pieces of school furniture; and 146,000 toilets. This, as it launches the government’s new “K plus 12” (Kindergarten plus 12 years) curriculum.

According to the Philippine Business for Education, out of five students that enter Grade 1, only three will finish Grade 6, and only two will finish high school. Overall, only about 10 percent of students will finish college.

Those who do finish college would find that their chances of getting employed are slim. Many of the graduates our schools are producing have skills that are not employable in today’s workplaces. Indeed, according to the Trade Union Congress of the Philippines, college graduates have the highest unemployment rate in the country at 26 percent.

Even the booming business-process outsourcing industry, one of the major components of the services sector, has a serious recruitment problem: for every 100 applicants only a small percentage (around 2 percent to 5 percent) is ready to be hired, while the rest fail because of poor English communication and technical skills.

But what’s most pitiable is how our education system has slipped way behind our neighbors in the region.

Guillermo Luz, cochairman of the National Competitiveness Council, presented the disturbing results of the 2010-11 Global Competitiveness Report of the World Economic Forum, the subject of our banner story on Tuesday.

According to the report, the Philippines ranks a poor seventh among nine Southeast Asian nations in education, science and technology, and innovation. In primary education, the Philippines ranked 99th out of 138 countries, 69th in educational system, 112th in science and math, and 76th on Internet access. In all categories, we were behind Singapore, Brunei, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam. We fared only better than Cambodia.

It has been more than a decade since members of the congressional Commission on Education, a joint body of the Senate and the House of Representatives, went around the country to make a national review and assessment of the Philippine education system, and came out with a set of recommendations that sought to solve these very problems that haunt us today.

Since then, the government has restructured the Education department with the creation of the Commission on Higher Education and the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority. It passed laws like the Magna Carta for Public School Teachers, the Government Assistance to Students and Teachers in Private Education, and the Special Program for Employment of Students. We have supposedly institutionalized funding for textbook assistance, tuition supplements and loans, scholarships, science and technology, vocational and technical training, faculty development, collaboration with private industries.

And yet even with all these good laws, policies and programs, it is clear from studies like the Global Competitiveness Report that, after being weighed and measured, our education system is still found significantly wanting; we are still a long way off from actualizing the Constitution’s mandate—and Rizal’s dream—to make quality education accessible to all.

A big part of the problem, as always, is money. There is a huge gap between the commitments we made on paper and the investments we are making in terms of actual disbursement of funds.

The Constitution mandates that education be given the highest budgetary priority, but the not-so-reassuring reality is that allocations made to education come in at a far second after debt servicing. We still have one of the lowest allocations for education in Asean.

Party-list Rep. Teodoro Casiño said the 2011 allocations for the DepEd and state universities and colleges (SUCs) in the General Appropriations Act show the miniscule amounts spent by the government on a per-student basis.

“The DepEd has P192,312,856,000 for this year. And that is for 22.05 million students enrolled in public schools—kindergarten, elementary and high-school levels. That is only P8,721.67 per public school [student] for 2011. That shows, indeed, that you won’t have enough classrooms, teachers and textbooks. That shows you will have multigrade classes in cramped classrooms and overworked public-school teachers,” he said.

The same goes for the tertiary level as SUCs only have a total of P22,035,085,000 for this year, which, with 1.2 million students, is only good for P18,362.57 per student.

Underinvestment on education has left us with public-school students who are falling below global standards in math, the sciences and English, and with poorly skilled college graduates who can’t get jobs even in industries where employment opportunities are teeming.

And since education is one of the most important factors that contribute to poverty alleviation, this is also why our neighbors have left us in the dust, economically. While corruption, as the President’s campaign slogan goes, could be blamed for our country’s poverty, so, too, can a poorly educated citizenry.

Had we put more money and resources behind our education laws, programs and policies, enough to ensure their effective implementation, perhaps international surveys and studies would show vastly different, more encouraging results. Perhaps, they’d show a country that would not only be the epitome of economic strength but also of quality education.

Then we’d certainly have more to celebrate on Rizal Day.