Philippine Basic Education

The narrative is quite familiar. Schools are failing therefore we need to do something. Education, however, is quite complicated and results from interventions often take time to materialize. On the other hand, it is likewise necessary to know if the interventions are not working or even worse, contributing more to the problems. In this regard, sound data and statistical analysis is urgently needed. One study from Rhode Island is one example. The state of Rhode Island decided to identify and categorize its schools acoording to student performance. Based on this categorization, schools are then mandated to implement interventions. Two years have passed and the study finds, "...schools required to implement few interventions performed no differently relative to schools that had no interventions required. Among lower-performing schools, those required to adopt more interventions did worse than schools mandated to implement fewer, including higher student mobility." This study...

"In every chain of reasoning, the evidence of the last conclusion can be no greater than that of the weakest link of the chain, whatever may be the strength of the rest," Thomas Reid wrote in the book  Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man . This year, the OECD published a study entitled Low-Performing Students: Why They Fall Behind and How To Help Them Succeed. In its release, it had the headline, "Helping the weakest students essential for society and the economy". Averages can hide reality. Average scores may be rising, but a true measure of schools' effectiveness is the performance of its weakest. Scores in the US national exams are indeed up for the District of Columbia (DC), but examining these scores in greater detail show that schools are still failing disadvantaged students. Blagg and Chingos have looked closely at the scores of schools in DC and have debunked the claim that the improvement is due to a decreasing number of black children attendin...

Everyone who has something to say about basic education often advocate for the future of our children. At least, that is what they often claim. Unfortunately, people have different ideas regarding what students really need. Take, for instance, the question of curriculum, what appears to be important depends on who you ask. It does seem that way if you listen to people who are quite a distance from a classroom. Apparently, with teachers there is some sort of an agreement on what students really need. Students need content knowledge, conscientiousness, critical thinking, and study skills based on a recent survey of educators in the United States . Above copied from ACT National Curriculum Survey 2016 In this survey, opinions from the workforce, supervisors and employees, are also included. The results are summarized in the following table. Above copied from  ACT National Curriculum Survey 2016 With the workforce, the common elements people think should be emphasized in th...

The Duterte administration that is scheduled to take over at the end of this month inherits DepEd's K to 12. There is the opinion that there is really no turning back as suspending the program will only lead to chaos and much wasted effort. An education reform needs to be weighed by evidence. A program that does not lead to better learning outcomes and instead, damages education and the society, needs to be scrapped as soon as possible. Economist Raul Fabella wrote four years ago in " K+12: Wasteland ": "...Sure there were scattered anecdotes of Philippine diploma holders having some problems in the global job market but that the concern for “missing years” could be partly explained by the perceived decline in quality of our graduates. Indian Institute of Technology engineering graduates are highly sought after globally despite no more aggregate number of schooling years than Philippine engineering graduates. Those potentially affected Philippine graduates can solv...

The Commission on Elections has set the following dates, October 12 through 16 this year, for filing of candidacy. It is no surprise to see posts and news about candidates saturating both social and mass media. Among the candidates for vice president is Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the son of a former dictator. While in the Senate, Marcos Jr. in a press release stated the following, "the K to 12 program, which will add two years of schooling, is not an effective way to improve the quality of education in the country. Instead, raising the competency of teachers and upgrading educational materials are the keys to raising the quality of education of Filipino students."    Reforms in education will only work with good implementation. Changes in curriculum can only be delivered to the classroom through its teachers. Teachers need to be prepared. Teachers need to be on board. Without support and engagement from the front line, education reforms are bound to fail. For this reason, e...

Posing this question probably sounds disrespectful. Contempt, however, is the last thing this blog is about. This question is more of a bewilderment bordering into frustration. Some of the ills the new DepEd K+12 curriculum is addressing are problems currently plaguing the higher education system in the country. The main reason why diplomas from the Philippines do not compare favorably from those abroad is not really about what students have been taught in elementary or high school. It is the typical college curriculum that has not kept with the demands and opportunities of this world. Philippine institutions of higher learning have become cradles of remedial education and for this reason, university faculty have not been using their knowledge to teach courses with substantial content. Diploma mills have become widespread and courses offered in college are truly no different from those provided in decent high schools. The new DepEd K+12 curriculum was in fact seen by some university fa...

Education International , a voice of teachers across the globe, is currently conducting an online survey to assess teaching and learning conditions worldwide: Online survey It is odd that a survey like this one seems necessary just to get the right information from the ground. The survey consists of several questions. Here are some of the questions in this survey that are very much relevant to finding the actual teaching and learning conditions inside schools. Answers to questions such as the ones shown above are crucial to fully grasp what conditions pupils and teachers have to deal with inside their classrooms. In the Philippines, accurate answers to these questions seem quite difficult to obtain. The president continues to insist that there are no shortages but news articles as well as images from the ground are telling a different story. The classroom below for example is not one where the teacher has decided not to use desks. There are simply no desks in this particular...

There is a correlation between the income level of a family and graduation rates. In a previous article posted on this blog, " Functional Literacy and Out of School Children in the Philippines " the following data from " Why are some Filipino children not in school? " have been highlighted: Above table captured from  " Why are some Filipino children not in school? " The following figure also brings out the striking correlation between poverty and not graduating: Downloaded from  " Profile of Out-of-School Children in the Philippines " The above shows the situation in the Philippines. One may be surprised to see that such correlation also exists in the United States. It is surprising because the United States unlike the Philippines has  Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 . (Financial Assistance To Local Educational Agencies For The Education Of Children Of Low-Income Families).   The United States also has a ...

There are various media through which information may be disseminated. Popular press and social media have the widest reach. With regard to very important issues, mass media indeed shoulder a great responsibility. With complicated matters, pundits are necessary to provide expert opinions so that the public could be best informed. Oftentimes, materials that need to be digested by the public are quite voluminous, deep or too complex that the eyes of an expert become indispensable. Reforms are being introduced on education in the US and in the Philippines. Unfortunately, in both cases, the media seem to have failed in informing the public. With a poorly informed public, political strategies are then very much in play. In the Philippines, where politics is still personality based and oligarchic, the media dropping the ball on correctly informing the public about education reforms serves the purpose of keeping everyone in the dark. In the United States, keeping a reform under a low key may ...

One would not ask a plumber to work on one's dental filling. One would not even request for a professional opinion from someone who works on pipes on what should be done with one's tooth. That would be stupid. Yet, in education, individuals who have no experience in teaching are not only quick to offer their opinion, but are even confident with their misguided suggestions. Take, for example, those who think that schools are run like prisons. These people try to malign school systems by stating that classrooms are nothing more than places where students can no longer question and must simply accept what is taught. These people have not even tried teaching in a classroom where pupils can not sit still or keep quiet. To suggest that order and discipline are unnecessary for teaching simply illustrates a complete lack of practical knowledge regarding classrooms. Still, these individuals think they hold the key to reforming education. Another pervasive thought among non-educators ...

The DepEd K+12 curriculum is supposed to be implemented in phases. For this reason, some students remain on the old curriculum while the new curriculum is being introduced one year at a time. Only the students who enrolled in first grade in 2012 would have gone through the new K+12 curriculum while in high school, only those who began first year in 2012 would have received the new 6-year secondary education. This means that during this year (school year 2013-2014) first and second year high school students are under the new curriculum while third and fourth year high students are still studying under the old 10-year basic education program. The phased implementation is in fact displayed in one of the web sites of the Philippines' Department of Education: With the above phased implementation, it is clear that grade 11, the first of the additional two years at the end of high school, can only be offered in 2016. The reason is simple: Only in 2016 would the first year high school...

Based on the PISA tests - the Programme for International Student Assessment, China is home to the best performing schools in the world. In published reports, Shanghai and Hong Kong are among the top of the international ranking. PISA's leader, Andreas Schleicher, also notes that the results from Shanghai and Hong Kong are not mere pockets of success in China's educational system. The entire country, even schools from the poor provinces, has performed well in the PISA tests. Sean Coughlan of BBC quotes Schleicher in his report " China: The world's most clever country ": "... Mr Schleicher says the results reveal a picture of a society investing individually and collectively in education. On a recent trip to a poor province in China, he says he saw that schools were often the most impressive buildings. He says in the West, it is more likely to be a shopping centre. "You get an image of a society that is investing in its future, rather than in current...

This post provides an overview of several articles in this blog that relate Diane Ravitch's Reign of Error  to problems and solutions in Philippine basic education. Reign of Error  specifically refers to the US educational system, but there should be no doubt that there is likewise a reign of error over Philippine basic education. It is true that there are differences. Ravitch, for example, emphasizes that there have been significant progress in US basic education. Public schools in the states have indeed gone a long way and there are indeed programs that work. In the Philippines, there are isolated bright spots but the overall picture is dramatically bleaker. The United States is likewise so much richer in resources while the Philippines does not really have that much. The Philippines can not afford to waste both time and resources. It is therefore more important that the vision and reform to solve problems in basic education are both grounded on solid evidence. Ravitch's cal...

This blog just went through each of the proposed solutions in the book Reign of Error  by Diane Ravitch. The solutions she proposed are rooted in a realistic view of what basic education really entails. The solutions must be based on a perspective that basic education is both a human right and responsibility. The solutions require first and foremost a recognition that poverty harms education. The solutions must come from where learning is supposed to occur, from inside the classrooms, most importantly, from the teachers who are working day and night on their thankless job of preparing the future members of society. Lastly, education should be focused on learning. Society should not throw all its other problems to education expecting that schools can solve these. Basic education is not an antidote to all of society's ills. Unfortunately, most education reforms are not built with the above in mind. For this reason, reforms fail. Above cartoon copied from The Problems With Educat...

Even in higher education, there is the liberal arts curriculum. Although the specific subjects may differ from college to college, a liberal arts education is quite different from professional, vocational or technical curricula. Harvard takes pride in its liberal education and on its admissions web page, one can read the following: The Value of a Liberal Arts Education   A Harvard education is a liberal education — that is, an education conducted in a spirit of free inquiry undertaken without concern for topical relevance or vocational utility. This kind of learning is not only one of the enrichments of existence; it is one of the achievements of civilization. It heightens students' awareness of the human and natural worlds they inhabit. It makes them more reflective about their beliefs and choices, more self-conscious and critical of their presuppositions and motivations, more creative in their problem-solving, more perceptive of the world around them, and more able to inform...

This blog now averages about 1500 views per day. It has more than 600 posts and the number of visits from the Philippines has now reached a total of 300,000. It has been more than a year and while trying to condense this entire blog into its most salient points, I came across Diane Ravitch's new book " Reign of Error ". (Ravitch, Diane (2013-09-17). Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools (Kindle Locations 6029-6030). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.) The book is notably and strongly supported by data and research.

Schools should teach good manners and right conduct. Schools should teach financial skills. Schools should teach family planning. Schools should teach that plunder is wrong. Schools should teach children what people in public office should be doing. More importantly, schools should teach children properly so that they do not grow up stealing taxpayer's money. Schools are expected to solve every problem society faces. Perhaps, it is one reason why schools fail. How about just being able to answer the following question? Provide conditions and reagents necessary for the following chemical reactions to occur: We are throwing all sorts of national problems into the classroom as if the solutions lie within the corners of one small room occupied by a teacher and a group of students. As a result, learning goals become equated with an advocacy. In so doing, the actual goals of education are lost and battles are waged between beliefs. Children end up not learning how to read, write an...