Philippine Basic Education

Education Week reports on the latest ACT exam results, a standardized exam that measures college readiness in the United States. Apparently, this year, the average score in the math section is a 20-year low. More recently, going as far back as 2014, the percentage of students reaching the math college readiness benchmark is actually declining. Thus, the trend is not just toward lower scores but also toward lower number of college-ready high school graduates.



And it is not just math. From the above graph, performance in English is also on a downward trajectory.

Adding to this worry is encapsulated by a remark from ACT mentioned in the Education Week article:
In general, test scores tend to decline when the pool of test-takers gets larger and includes more students of varying skill levels. The most recent class of ACT-tested students was smaller, however, and its diversity was unchanged, ACT officials said. The fact that scores declined anyway is cause for serious concern, Roorda said. …

Everyone has some sense of humor including me and I do find some posts on the web that share student's unusual answers to test questions rib-tickling. One site actually has a collection of such posts, "Hilarious Test Answers from Kids" by Robert Wabash, which even ranks the answers by readers' votes. One case comes from either a physics or chemistry exam.


If you were the one teaching these topics, the above maybe distressing if this comes from one of the students in your class. But if this student is not in your class, you have to agree that this is quite funny. This is why these posts generally turn out to be quite viral in social media.

Recently, there is one that has become viral on social media in the Philippines. It is from Lola Nidora, a character in the noontime soap opera Kalyesere.


The above test question is asking the student to illustrate through a sketch how someone can become a hero. The student is then asked to summarize in a couple of sentences what hi…

The quality of education or lack of it is often equated to inadequate resources. Lack of materials, a poor curriculum, being underprivileged are among the factors frequently cited as obstacles to good basic education. There is one factor, however, inside the classroom that can still make a significant difference even amidst dire conditions. It is the teacher. For this reason, numerous efforts have been made to design ways by which a teacher can be evaluated and then hopefully supported. Unfortunately, there is not much solid evidence of teaching evaluations that actually work. The National Council on Teacher Quality in the United States has recently released a report that cites six places that appear to have teaching eveluation systems that benefit both student learning, and teacher retention and effectiveness.

One of the six places is the state of New Mexico. Its teacher evaluation system especially caught my attention because it is definitely a system in which teacher evaluations ar…

Having access to information at your fingertips sounds great. This is what technology has to offer. Of course, access comes with not so good things as well. In terms of privacy, using a global positioning system application, for instance, can collect and store data on one's whereabouts. And for information, greater access can also mean greater misinformation. With Facebook, sharing has become too easy that most do not even ask the question if something is indeed worth sharing or not, or more importantly, if the information is correct or not.

The innovative educator blog has provided the following rules:
If you have not verified something is true, keep it to yourself.
If you don’t have the time to verify it, keep it to yourself.
If you like the idea, and don’t care if it’s verified, keep it to yourself.
If you don’t care if it’s true, you think it is interesting and want to share, keep it to yourself.
If you can't help yourself because you love sending spammy chain messages to …

Teachers should teach children not what to think but how to think. At first sight, this statement may sound reasonable but it is in fact false. No one conceives ideas out of nothing. How we think is shaped by what we know. This is especially true when it comes to matters that are controversial or judgmental. How we think is also influenced by how we feel. More importantly, it is shaped by our beliefs. And when it comes to impressionable individuals, especially children, it is often a lot easier to copy how one thinks than to understand or grasp what one actually thinks. Young minds can be easily persuaded or even pressured to accept what adults say. For these reasons, a teacher inside a classroom of students must be careful, thoughtful and considerate since he or she is really in front of a captive and impressionable audience. Critical thinking should remain adherent to facts, but by its very nature, it should not likewise serve a teacher's set of beliefs or agenda. As teachers, w…

English is considered as a primary academic language. Most books and journals on almost every discipline are often written and published in English. English, however, is not the mother tongue of a significant number of children. Even in the United States, one can easily find elementary schools where a significant number of students are not native English speakers. Although one may regard this as a challenge for schools, having a mixture of non-native and native English speakers in one classroom actually provides an excellent opportunity for a genuine bilingual education. Unfortunately, most programs choose either immersion (in which students abandon their native tongue in favor of English) or transitional (in which the language spoken at home is used in the early years simply as a support for instruction). This is perhaps due to practical reasons as bilingual education requires more resources. For one, teachers need to be proficient in the native language and culture of their students…