DESPITE ITS SINISTER CONNOTATIONS, ?HAVing an agenda? is definitely not a bad thing. (Having a hidden agenda is, though.) In fact, a clearly defined agenda enables individuals and groups with differing points of view or divergent interests to sit down and reason together on complex issues.
Education is a complex issue with equally complicated ramifications. It affects just about everybody and everybody has something to say about it. For example, the parents of children enrolled in private schools continue to reel from the increasing cost of tuition they have to pay to keep their children in a high-performing school. The parents of public school children on the other hand try to make do with whatever learning their child might get from an endemically overburdened system. The teachers in both public and private sectors continue to argue for more and better training and better working conditions while the school heads want more autonomy.
Local philanthropic groups, corporate foundations and NGOs are looking for?but are hard-pressed to find?more tangible across-the-board increments in education achievement, because by their own estimates they have poured in billions of pesos worth of assistance yearly.
Meanwhile, education executives of private schools, colleges and universities are very worried that their institutions might fold due to very tight market conditions. They are also apprehensive of the growing evidence that the skills and competencies that their graduates have acquired are becoming irrelevant in the 21st-century world of work. The national government is equally anxious because the 2010 Education for All Global Monitoring Report (EFA GMR) cites the Philippines as ?making less progress than expected? toward Universal Primary Education. The EFA GMR also says that ?achieving UPE by 2015 should have been a formality, given [the Philippines?] wealth level and starting point at the time, and there is now a real danger that, without decisive political leadership, the country will miss the goal. In the Philippines, only 2.3 percent of GNP was invested in education, compared with the East Asian subregional average of 3.6 percent.?
Through it all, our learners continue to languish in the bottom quartile of every international achievement test that we?ve participated in. Furthermore, the number of functionally illiterate adults seems to be growing.
The Basic Education Sector Reform Agenda or Besra was drafted in 2006. It is the product of in-depth discussions with the country?s brightest minds coupled with intensive research and consultations with education stakeholders and interest groups.
Besra seeks to ?create a basic education sector that is capable of attaining the country?s Education for All Objectives by the year 2015.? Toward this, Besra sets the following desired education outcomes:
1. All persons beyond school-age, regardless of their levels of schooling should acquire the essential competence to be considered functionally literate in their native tongue, in Filipino or in English.
2. All children aged 6 should enter school ready to learn and prepared to achieve the required competencies from Grade 1 to 3 instruction.
3. All children aged 6 to 11 should be on track to completing elementary schooling with satisfactory achievement levels at every grade, and all children aged 12 to 15 should be on track to completing secondary schooling with similarly satisfactory achievement levels at every year.
4. Every community should mobilize all its social, political, cultural and economic resources and capabilities to support the universal attainment of basic education competencies in Filipino and English.
To achieve these education outcomes, Besra calls for strong and sustained efforts toward involving communities in the reform effort, continuously upgrading teacher competencies and teaching quality, and building and mobilizing an institution-level national constituency. Moreover, Besra underscores the importance of early childhood care and alternative learning systems and the critical role that the private sector plays in increasing their reach. Finally, Besra explicitly acknowledges that the institutional culture of the Department of Education will need to change, and that it ?will need to move out of its worst centralized, bureaucratized, mechanistic and simplistic mindsets and habits if it hopes to attain population-wide higher level learning outcomes.?
Truly, Besra is Philippine education?s promise of redemption. It is also a promise that has so far remained unkept.
On Tuesday, March 9 at 2 p.m., the esteemed Dr. Maria Serena Diokno will lead a panel of experts (Drs. Cynthia Rose Bautista, Dina Ocampo and Allan Bernardo) in investigating why Besra, despite being both comprehensive and progressive, has failed to live up to expectations. The panel will ?examine the philosophical and practical underpinnings of current reform plans and proposals.? The panel?s analysis and proposed reform guidelines extend to the tertiary sector.
The forum, titled ?The Promise of Redemption: Besra and the Need for Higher Education Reform,? will be held at the UP National Institute for Math and Science Education (UP Nismed). It is organized jointly by the UP Office of the President, the Office of the Vice President for Academic Affairs, the College of Education and the College of Law and the Center for Integrative Development Studies. Education stakeholders and those who have something to say about Philippine education should not miss this one.
Butch Hernandez (butchhernandez@gmail.com) is the executive director of the Foundation for Worldwide People Power.
