State of Philippine Education May 30, 2011 Mr. Speaker, dear colleagues, a pleasant afternoon.

I rise to discuss a pressing matter that affects our 55 million youths. It is our education system and the attendant problems plaguing it. The fast-approaching school opening is the first under the administration of President Benigno Aquino III and it is crucial that we put on the table these education issues as they will contour the policies we should create. As the only youth representative of this body, I believe it is my duty to report the state of Philippine education to my esteemed colleagues here in Congress. Likewise, I believe that it is our collective duty as servants of the people to substantially address these education problems once and for all. So where do we stand today? Last week, our three education agencies DEPED, CHED, TESDA conducted an education forum which proved informative if only for substantiating the claim that our education system needs urgent actions. To borrow the description of one of our education secretaries, the Philippine education system is in chaos. And rightly so. Chaotic is the word that befits the long-standing crisis that lays hold of our education system. This description provides a convenient transition to discuss the many woes of our education sector. To briefly sketch the survival rate of our youths in schools , allow me to share an example which I believe is familiar to many. Of the 100 pupils that enter grade 1, only 66 will finish grade six; 58 will enroll in 1st year; 43 will finish high school; 33 will enter college; and only 21 will eventually graduate, and this 21 graduates are not even sure to land a job. A question worth asking, Mr. Speaker, is: what will happen to the 79 youths who did not make it? Your guess is as good as mine, Mr. Speaker. A quick glance at the outside world is enough to provide us a concrete face for these out-of-school youths they are the young workers in construction, they are the young involved in drugs and prostitution, they are the sellers who knock at our car windows, they are the passionate dreamers who painfully awakened to the grim reality that they just have to waive their dreams of becoming scientists, doctors, engineers, teachers Mr. Speaker, colleagues, our education system has become so inaccessible over the years that more and more of our youth are forced to stop studying altogether. It is with regret that I say that we are in many ways accountable for this crisis. The insufficient government spending to basic social services like education remains to be a major issue that paralyzes the qualitative functioning of our education system.

Allow me now to go into specifics and tackle basic education. For 2011, it is a welcome development that there is a slight increase in the budget of basic education. From a P175 billion budget last year, it grew by 18% to P207 billion this year. Yet this despite this increase, it is crucial to note that the increase remains grossly insufficient in addressing the needs of basic education. This lack of budget, regrettably, imperils a smooth school opening as shortages in textbooks, chairs, classrooms and teachers continue to plague basic education. Mr. Speaker, colleagues, how can basic education qualitatively function in the context of these dire shortages? Our students cannot properly learn if, in the first place, there are no sufficient classrooms to study in, chairs to seat on, teachers to learn from, and textbooks to read. Our basic education woes force many public schools to pass the burden of making ends meet to the students and parents. Despite DepEds voluntary pay policy, students and parents complain of dipping into their limited resources to pay for various fees used for the Parent-Teacher Association, books and materials, class requirements like film showings, school events, and so on. Recent results from international tests which gauge the quality of basic education also do not paint a rosy picture for our country. The low scores of the Philippines in the Testing in Math and Science of Students (TIMSS), for instance, indicate that much still has to be improved in the quality of our basic education. Aware of the implications of these international indicators, the Department of Education has been vocal in committing itself to focus on improving the quality of our basic education. The solution, or so we are told, is to add two more years in the basic education cycle. This plan is packaged as K-12. For the record, Mr. speaker, I very much understand that added learning and training period in elementary and high school could be beneficial for our youth. The K-12 proposal, however, is rendered problematic by the context within which it is set to be implemented and the direction it intends to take. In a study entitled Length of School Cycle and the Quality of Education, educators Abraham Felipe and Carolina Porio aver that there is no correlation between the length of the school cycle and the quality of education. What is interesting is they made use of TIMSS as the basis for their study, the same indicator used by DepEd to justify improving the quality of education through K12. The findings of the study underscore the clear and irrefutable evidence that some countries with the same school cycle as the Philippines have high scores; other countries with longer cycles than the Philippines have low scores. In addition to this issue of non-correlation between the length of school-cycle and quality of education, it is important that we also grasp the framework of K-12.

Simply put: the plan wants to rapidly generate employable high school graduates that will fill in the demands of the foreign market. Mr. Speaker, I believe that to genuinely improve the quality of basic education, we should put a stop to plugging the dreams of our people to the demands of foreign market. Instead, our focus should be completely re-oriented to produce a holistically trained workforce that contributes to national industrialization and development. It also strikes the eye that there is a clear disconnect between the daring K-12 plan and the budget commitment from the government. In light of the budget deficits to finance the shortages of our basic education, K-12 cannot but appear as a recipe for disaster should DepEd push through with the plan. As it is, DepEd needs at least an additional P140.43 billion to eradicate the shortages, including funds for the growing number of our out-of-school youths. Just as the current basic education problems require careful analysis and logical solutions, so do the problems confronting tertiary education. Salient among the problems of higher education are quality and accessibility. In the last three years, the passing rate in licensure examinations continues to decline across all disciplines [insert slide]. CHED also reveals that only 5.5% or 100 HEIs can be assumed to have adequate facilities [insert slide]. Amidst this decline in quality, tuition and other fees continue to increase which makes higher education inaccessible for our people. CHEDs argument that tuition and other fee increase (TOFI) translates to better facilities and higher salaries for teachers does not hold because 1) despite TOFI, majority of schools still have poor facilities. 2) the salary of many of our teachers does not automatically increase every TOFI, and in fact, has remained inadequate for the past years. All these while many school owners rake in millions every increase. In a 2011 ranking of colleges and universities in Asia which placed four Philippine schools in the top 200, the result underscores the dismal state of tertiary education in the country. It is worth noting that majority of the top Asian schools, including the leading Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, are universities substantially funded and supported by their respective governments. This appreciation for tertiary education starkly contrasts with the existing education policies in our country. Our State Universities and Colleges (SUCs), for instance are neglected to utter destitution and are increasingly pushed to commercialize themselves. [insert gdp slide) Mr. Speaker, it will probably take me one whole day to thoroughly discuss the worsening state of Philippine education. The aforementioned education realities may no longer sound new to many. It is also true that we have exerted countless efforts to alleviate the education crisis. Yet one cannot fail to notice that despite these efforts the education crisis continues to intensify. This necessarily requires us to rethink timeworn education frameworks which legitimize government

neglect of the education sector, hence opening this very field to be devoured by the market. Clearly, the policies that govern our education sector have to undergo a merciless rethinking in order to save the hope our youth possess. Without breaking away from education measures that compulsively fuel the very same problems weve had since time immemorial, we cannot expect to provide quality and accessible education for our youth. In the absence of quality and accessible education, it will be very hard for our youth to realize their historic role to help inaugurate genuine change and prosperity for our nation. The challenge for us lawmakers is to instigate effective political solutions which will make these education problems a thing of the past.