Philippine Basic Education

One can make comparisons between countries. With such exercise, one may find correlations. Here is one. Corruption and basic education seem to be strongly correlated. Countries where corruption is perceived to be low tend to have better educational systems. Transparency International   provides on an annual basis a Corruption Perception Index (CPI) , a measure of the perceived level of public sector corruption for each country. The 2015 numbers are now available and the following lists the 40 least corrupt countries in the world. Rank CPI2015 Country 1 91 Denmark 2 90 Finland 3 89 Sweden 4 88 New Zealand 5 87 Netherlands 5 87 Norway 7 86 Switzerland 8 85 Singapore 9 83 Canada 10 81 Germany 10 81 Luxembourg 10 81 United Kingdom 13 79 Australia 13 79 Iceland 15 77 Belgium 16 ...

Last night, my nine-year old son was using my smartphone. I thought he was checking on his current collection of football cards in the Topps Kick app . Then, I heard him talked on the phone, " Okay, Google, how old is Neymar, Junior ? The phone answered, " Neymar is 23 years old. " My son was using Google's Voice Search app on my phone. So I took the phone and asked, " Okay, Google, What is a hygrometer ", since my son's fourth grade class was currently studying weather in their science class. The phone answered, " Hygrometer, an instrument for measuring the humidity of the air or a gas ". To say the least, I made the excitement disappear. It is truly amazing what digital devices can do. I can check on my smartphone on how my students are doing in their homework. The flipside is students can check on something else while they are listening to my lecture. I do walk around the classroom while I give the lecture so that probably discourages st...

A post on this blog more than a year ago talked about Instructional Continuity . The article was in response to flooding brought by heavy rains in the capital region of Manila in the Philippines. This time, a blizzard just left a thick blanket of snow in our area in Virginia. Elementary, middle and high schools are all closed and so is Georgetown University. As a faculty, I am encouraged to take measures so as to minimize the interruption in instruction. So I have posted my slides with the transcribed lecture my students would miss. Here is one of the slides. Last Friday, before the snow storm hit, I reminded my students of the importance of solving problems at the end of each chapter as well as distributed practice, as supported by evidence from cognitive and educational psychology . This, of course, likewise applies to basic education. Mason Crest Elementary School tries to address instructional continuity with the following video: February 26, 2015 Snow Day Story Time! ...

Over ten years ago, when elementary schools in Paete were given the opportunity to explore what the internet had to offer, students had the chance to see the four seasons through photographs from the United States . Today, of course, is an excellent opportunity to share with pupils in the Philippines how a blizzard looks like. More than a foot of snow has fallen in the Washington DC area and there is more to come. We are quite eager to share our knowledge and experiences with young minds. Facebook reminds us of how much we like to share information with others. As teachers, however, we also need to be open to what our children maybe telling us. This morning, while I was browsing through Facebook , I came across this post shared by Troy Colmenares : The post did not come with any information regarding the student who answered this exercise. It was a bit difficult to comprehend what the student wrote because of spelling and the use of more than one language. I had a brief conve...

With the realization of the importance of the early years in education, changes have occurred in the kindergarten curriculum in the United States. To gauge whether these changes are for better or worse, it is necessary to identify the changes first. Daphna Bassok, Scott Latham, and Anna Rorem from the University of Virginia have recently provided a systematic comparison between the state of kindergarten during the years 1998 and 2011, considering the following dimensions: (1) what teachers consider as important for school, (2) time spent on each subject, (3) how teachers manage their classroom, (4) teaching practices, and (5) how teachers measure learning outcomes. Their findings are published in the journal  AERA Open . By examining data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS-K:1998 and ECLS-K:2011), which includes thousands of kindergarten students and teachers, major changes in Kindergarten have been found across all dimensions. Especially worth noting is the d...

Paul Kiel in the New York Times  writes: " The most recent federal survey in 2013 put the difference in net worth between the typical white and black family at $131,000. That’s a big number, but here’s an even more troubling statistic: About one-quarter of African-American families had less than $5 in reserve . Low-income whites had about $375. " There is race and there is income. Some even look at gender differences, but data on socio-economic status and education are clear: There is a widening gap between poor and rich children when it comes to education outcomes. Sean F. Reardon summarizes the findings on the "Income Achievement Gap" in an article published more than two years ago in Educational Leadership . Here are the important points: 1. The difference in academic achievement based on standardized test scores between poor and rich children has been increasing. Above copied from Educational Leadership While differences in test scores between a bl...

Above copied from Barack Obama's Facebook page “... For most of the past decade the field of education has been a battleground in the freedom struggle. It was not fortuitous that education became embroiled in this conflict. Education is one of the vital tools the Negro needs in order to advance. And yet it has been denied him by devises of segregation and manipulations with quality.  Historically, to keep Negroes in oppression they were deprived an education. In slave days it was illegal to teach a slave to read or write. With the ending of slavery and the emergence of quasi freedom, Negroes were only partially educated — sufficient to make their work efficient but insufficient to raise them to equality.  The walling off of Negroes from equal education is part of the historical design to submerge him in second-class status. Therefore as Negroes have struggled to be free they have had to fight for the opportunity for a decent education....  ...The riche...