Philippine Basic Education

"Read on grade level, write legibly, know basic math,   distinguish between a claim supported by evidence and an assertion, ask for help, stay organized, and break down a project into smaller parts" complete the list necessary for any level of education. This list is provided by Douglas Reeves in " The Getting Them Ready Myth " at Creative Leadership Solutions. The list as noted by Reeves is not exactly identical with what teachers often do to help prepare their students in the future. Plenty of time is of course devoted to acquiring knowledge in basic education, which is by the way important for reading comprehension. How we comprehend what we read relies heavily on our background knowledge. But what is unfortunately missing are the skills required to thrive in learning: learning to ask for help and making oneself organized. There is a desire to narrow the achievement gap between low-income and high-income children. It is a fact that low-income children have l...

When something involves several factors, we need to be careful in drawing conclusions. In the physical sciences, experiments are designed to focus on one factor at a time while controlling others when the object of the investigation is multivariate. Basic education is an example of a complex system. For this reason, before we declare that we have found a silver bullet, we need to pay attention to details. Megha Satyanarayana wrote recently an article in the Chemical and Engineering News  that shared an apparent successful innovation in chemistry undergraduate education at the Michigan State University. In " Stop. Draw. Discuss: How high school approaches are helping fix undergraduate chemistry ", the following comments from a 20-year old student are highlighted: “It was interactive. We could talk to the people sitting next to us. It’s not like learning facts. It’s more like common sense, or reasoning,” Above copied from C&EN Helping students to become more engaged...

This is a repost from four years ago. It contains important insights on how teachers of Mathematics affect learning outcomes in Mathematics. It goes without saying that teaching mathematics requires more than just knowing how to do mathematics. If knowing how to do math is all that it takes then I can easily teach my son who is in second grade math. Teachers of mathematics in basic education are not only trained in doing math but also in teaching math. It is therefore reasonable to expect that learning outcomes in math depend on the quality of training teachers of mathematics have received. The following are some of the exhibits provided by  The Teacher Education Study in Mathematics (TEDS-M) in 2008 of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA). This is an interesting study because it includes both the Philippines and the United States. It also includes countries that perform very well in international standardized exams in math like Singa...

There are plenty of factors that can negatively impact the chances that a child born in poverty will graduate with a bachelor's degree. Above copied from Center for Poverty Research, UC Davis Those born in affluent families have ample opportunities to visit zoos, museums, and even other countries during their early childhood years. Rich children can afford to spend their days in high quality preschools. They are introduced to a greater number of books in their homes. Their parents, unlike those in poor households who are often forced to work more than forty hours a week just to make ends meet, are able to spend more of their time and money with their young children. Poor children likewise spend their formative years in poor neighborhoods. The environment a child grows in is also strongly correlated with a child's chances of reaching college . Schools that provide basic education to these poor neighborhoods also experience the greatest challenges. Like a domino effect, ev...

Students in the Philippines have not been participating in international standardized exams for over a decade now. In 2003, fourth grade students in the Philippines ranked 23rd out of 25 countries and in 2008, during which only students from science high schools participated, the Philippines ranked last among ten countries participating. Teachers in primary and secondary schools in the Philippines also partook in the Teacher Education and Development Study in Mathematics (TEDS-M). The results of this study have been recently analyzed and in terms of quality assurance, teacher education in the Philippines does not fare well. In terms of both content and pedagogical knowledge, math teachers in the Philippines are near the bottom. The following graphs summarize the findings. Above graph based on Quality Assurance in Teacher Education and Outcomes: A Study of 17 Countries Lawrence Ingvarson, Glenn Rowley Educational Researcher Vol 46, Issue 4, pp. 177 - 193 First published date...

As an undergraduate student at the Ateneo de Manila University, I was required to take 5 courses in Theology, 4 courses in Philosophy, 2 courses in History, 4 courses in Spanish, 4 courses in English, 2 courses in Filipino, 2 courses in Economics, 1 course in Sociology/Anthroplogy, 1 course in Psychology, 1 course on the Philippine Constitution, and of course there was Citizen Military Training and Physical Education. These added to the required science courses of Calculus, Physics, General Chemistry, Quantitative Analysis, Organic Chemistry, Physical Chemistry, Inorganic Chemistry, Biochemistry, Industrial Chemistry, and Analytical Chemistry and a couple of electives in Computer Science. I would agree that the curriculum I went through was indeed heavy. In order to graduate in four years, I had to carry a full load for three summer sessions. Perhaps, this was one extreme. The other extreme, I believe, was passed recently by the University of the Philippines Diliman University Council...

"How does allowing a student to opt out of a program to provide him or her with assistance teach responsibility? If a student is truly going to enter a sink-or-swim situation in higher education, the best preparation is to teach the student to swim — to provide the student with the knowledge, skills and habits essential to success in that situation — rather than allow the student to sink first in high school", Richard DuFour writes in his book  In Praise of American Educators: And How They Can Become Even Better . Jay Mathews of the Washington Post  took notice of this statement and called it "brilliant" in his column on education. But there is one comment that caught my attention on Mathews' article. Part of it says "We make too many excuses in modern America, we give too many second chances. Penalties and consequences exist for a reason. Carrots alone don't work, you need the stick too. And sometimes people need to hit bottom before they get better. T...

Providing access to higher education is a popular idea. Unfortunately, the true benefits and more importantly, the costs of college with no tuition are seldom examined in depth. People from countries that do not provide college education free of tuition often cite European countries that do. They are quick to point out that these countries are able. But most fail to consider how stringent admissions in these colleges are as well as the rates of income tax in these countries. Furthermore, countries that do not charge tuition for college lag those that do charge in terms of the percentage of college graduates: Above copied from OECD In the above graph, countries with no college tuition are highlighted. Countries that do charge tuition are among those that have the highest percentage of its population with a tertiary education. The Philippines should learn from this data. The country cannot afford to pay for the college education for everyone. Its institutions of higher education ar...

Deliberation in legislature is an intellectual process through which information is both gathered and weighed, costs of implementation are taken into account, other options are identified, and benefits, harms, as well as unintended consequences are examined. In a manner that is almost completely whimsical, the Philippines legislature has decided to pay for the college tuition in all state universities and colleges (SUCs) for the year 2017. Eight billion pesos have been added to the higher education budget for 2017, solely earmarked to subsidize the tuition of almost one and a half million students of SUCs. Whether this goes beyond one year is unclear since this is a one time funding provided by an appropriations bill. What is crystal clear, however, is that the Philippine lawmakers can decide where billions of pesos will go, seemingly without any thoughtful deliberation. Those who question the wisdom behind the decision to provide free college for a year are thought to be critici...

" Free college education is not free ", a previous post on this blog, argues why free tuition in state universities and colleges is bad for the Philippines. It is not for the poor. "Poor students are already failing in basic education. It is then very highly unlikely for these students to even apply for college admissions. There are indeed some poor students who are able to beat the odds, and it is a lot more prudent to ensure that these students receive full scholarships and living allowances than to offer free college education to all." There is currently a huge inequity in basic education, which then guarantees that most beneficiaries of free college are not coming from families who most need assistance from the government. In effect, children from wealthy and middle-class families will be able to go to college for free on the back of tax-paying poor families who cannot even afford to have their children finish high school. Worse, to implement this at the tail of...

There is nothing inherently wrong in the additional years of DepEd's K to 12. What is harmful is its ill-conceived solutions to the problems education in the Philippines is facing. DepEd's K to 12 fails to recognize that the major problems lie in the early years and in higher education. Thus, it wrongly focuses on the latter years of high school, completely missing the roots of the problem, college and the elementary years. The impact of DepEd's K to 12 on learning outcomes in higher education, of course, still remains to be seen since the senior years in high school just started this year. Understanding the problem is key to solving the problem so it is really disconcerting to see a professor in the Philippines sharing a statement on social media that DepEd's K to 12 has harmed higher education. Higher education in the Philippines is indeed facing a crisis, as shown by Jobers Bersales in the Cebu Daily News . This crisis, however, has been present long before Dep...

Politicians make promises. Of course, a lot of voters are also quite cynical. There are, however, promises that are obviously difficult to keep. There are also promises that may be attractive at first, but after a thoughtful analysis, may actually end up hurting society. One example is free tuition in state colleges. We in fact have heard this from Bernie Sanders in the US. In the Philippines, there is a bill currently filed in the Senate for free college in state universities and colleges (SUCs). Appealing this proposal maybe, free college education is not free. Above copied from the Senate of the Philippines Facebook page Such bill is actually as bad as the DepEd K+12 law passed in 2013. One glaring similarity between the two is the lack of consideration for what is necessary to implement the law. Another is its complete neglect of unintended consequences. And lastly, although both claim to help the poor, these measures will make matters worse.  Free college education...

The title of this article is a bit misleading. Attending college in an elite institution in the Philippines was not normal for my socio-economic status. Seeing a "G" on a paper I turned in and later hearing the professor explained that "G" did not mean "good", but "very bad grammar", could have easily made me feel ostracized and not good enough for college. Hearing a professor say that I had nothing between my ears did not help either. But I probably knew then that there were others before me who had experienced major setbacks but did not give up. I perhaps believed then that becoming a chemist was not something I was born with, but was something I needed to work hard for. Honestly, what worked for me was support and confidence from my peers and mentors. Results recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences  show that simple interventions can improve the survival rate of colored and disadvantaged students in college....

In universities in the United States, an assistant professor usually spends a probationary period of six years before applying for promotion and tenure. Not receiving tenure at the end of the probationary period means an automatic dismissal from the university. Some are able to receive tenure before the end of six years if the dossier is good enough. Tenure is awarded by the president of the university upon the recommendation of the a university's committee on rank and tenure, which is composed of faculty members. The committee draws its decision based on the recommendation of the applicant's department, deans, and reviewers from other universities. The dossier is basically evaluated on an applicant's scholarly contribution, teaching, and service to the university and the community. One's scholarly contribution is based on publications in peer-reviewed journals as well as a record of acquiring competitive extramural research grants. Tenure is awarded to protect academ...

Education policy makers are often quick to claim that reforms they introduce are informed by research. Unfortunately, in education, there is usually a gap between research and practice. In the state of Mississippi, a study by the The Barksdale Reading Institute (BRI) and The Institutions of Higher Learning (IHL) found that established research-based principles of early-literacy instruction remain largely unapplied in teachers' preparation and practice. Teaching colleges fail to teach teachers practices that are currently supported by evidence. Consequently, practices that become widely used in classrooms are those unsupported by research. Often, these practices are even misinterpretations of what research says. Click here to read the entire report The research work the study focused on that is found largely missing in teaching colleges' curriculum is not actually that recent. BRI and IHL looked at teacher preparatory programs in Mississippi to check if  evidence-based ...

DepEd's K to 12 senior high school years come in different tracks. One track is called the academic track which comes in four different strands, Business, Accountancy, Management (BAM); Humanities, Education, Social Sciences (HESS); Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics (STEM); and General. There are other tracks in senior high school: Technical-Vocational Livelihood, Sports, and Arts and Design. Regardless of track, the senior high school years are advertised to make each student college-ready. This of course suggests that the specialized subjects within the academic tracks are "college-level". For the finalized strands, please visit DepEd's Academic Track It is therefore useful to examine the effectiveness of taking college-level courses in high school. Fortunately, this question can be addressed by looking at educational systems that already offer college-level courses in secondary school. The United States K-12 system is one great source of data for ...