When Reforms Don't Transform: Reflections on Philippine Education

UP Centennial Lecture; November 12, 2008 (DRAFT)
by Ma. Cynthia Rose B. Bautista, Allan B. I. Bernardo, and Dina Ocampo

The Seasons of Education Reform: An Overview

The Philippines has had a long history of education reform. Although our education system evolved from a colonial cocoon, the American imperialist agenda nevertheless included a reformist seed. It made elementary education compulsory to enable mass participation in elections and thereby break the hold of the oligarchy. By so doing, it hoped to undermine the elitist educational system under Spain that left the Filipino masses unschooled.

However, transplanting an American education model into an oligarchic system that the Americans reinforced by co-opting the elite, did not result in egalitarian structures. Neither did it level the playing field in education. The education system in the early American colonial period supported prevailing inequities. Primary education was for the working class; secondary education for the middle class, and tertiary education for leaders and the economic elite who demanded the establishment of an American system of higher education. The creation of the University of the Philippines in 1908 satisfied this demand and capped the development of a three-tiered public education system which has morphed into our system today.

Despite its class bias and colonial orientation, the reformist seed planted in the early days of colonial education sprouted somewhat. It provided a means of social mobility for significant numbers of poor Filipinos/. It also produced critical and nationalist thinkers who pushed for social reforms in different periods of the 20th century.

The establishment of the public education system heralded a series of reform-oriented initiatives with progressive assumptions. Consider the 1925 Monroe Survey. Yale professor George Counts was part of this team. In October 1925, his assessment of the key problems of Philippine basic education sounded like the issues confronting our country today. Half of the children were outside the reach of schools. Pupil performance was generally low in subjects that relied on English although achievement in math and science was at par with the average performance of American school children.

Counts attributed these problems to the language of teaching in a culturally diverse colony. In fact, Counts bewailed the teaching of subjects in English in the absence of a lingua franca. He argued that this sacrificed “efficiency of instruction in the native tongue”. 

Counts also argued that the curriculum was not suited to the Filipino children of the 1920s.  They were handicapped by their reliance on experiences drawn from a civilization alien to them. Not only were they acquiring new ideas in a language not their own they were also studying under a curriculum borrowed directly from the United States using materials suited for American children. Their teachers were also professionally untrained. But the Monroe Survey’s severest criticism of the Philippine education system in 1925 was on its excessive centralized control which resulted in the uniform implementation of a Western curriculum throughout the archipelago.  For Counts, this “one-size-fits all” practice was utterly indefensible considering the great diversity of climate, occupation, and cultural traditions in the Philippines.

UP history professor Digna Apilado wrote that our public education had not always been centralized.  The American colonial government initially required municipalities and provinces to finance primary and secondary schools, respectively setting aside state funds only for the state university. Local primary schools briefly enjoyed a wide range of autonomy to design their curriculum and educational materials. However, they lost this freedom to innovate and respond to local needs because towns and provinces were too poor to defray the costs of free and compulsory schooling. The insular government was thus compelled to assume funding for

all three education levels.

Since 1925, various reviews have cited the same fundamental issues afflicting Philippine education . This prompted four leading educationists to facetiously say that the education landscape has not changed since colonial days.

We will not repeat the usual lamentations about persistent inequities and poor pupil performance. We will, however, cite two less known but nevertheless disturbing observations . The Basic Education Assistance for Mindanao or BEAM’s Region-Wide Assessment in Mathematics, Science, and English revealed that sample students in three Mindanao regions including ARMM had great difficulty with items requiring higher order thinking skills. In particular, the high school students in the sample were unable to apply concepts and reasoning to real life situations.

Equally distressing,  are comparisons of the country’s primary net enrolment and completion rates with those of other countries in Asia-Pacific. The 2008 World Bank education data show that Cambodia and Laos have higher primary net enrollment and completion rates than us. The contrast with our neighbors Indonesia and Malaysia is sharp. The two countries have primary enrollment and completion rates that are much higher than ours.

Although the same issues have persisted since the 1960s, a review of the last forty years, reveals significant changes within and outside our education institutions. The 1970 Presidential Commission to Survey Philippine Education, for instance, reorganized the educational system to address over-centralization and the mismatch between educational output and the country’s needs. Outside the education bureaucracy, the late UP professor Malu Doronila claimed that the NGOs and POs of the mass movement in the same period sought to address the irrelevance of education with “counter-education, literacy, and other community-based political education efforts”. Spanning the education spectrum, these initiatives included neighborhood daycare centers, alternative schools for special children, and farmer-scientist programs. Some of the education practices of these groups were eventually mainstreamed; the groups also participated in extensive networks of educators in and out of government.

Four broad education reform frameworks emerged in the last 20 years. Jointly led by Senator Angara and Congressman Padilla and implemented by a Technical Secretariat headed by former UP Chancellor Dionisia Rola, The Congressional Commission on Education or EDCOM proposed a comprehensive set of reforms on issues ranging from access and quality to language of instruction. It restructured the education system into DepEd, CHED, and TESDA. Subsequent plans drew from its analysis, frameworks and recommendations.

The Basic Education Sector Reform Agenda or the BESRA, DepEd’s latest reform framework is comprehensive and offers enough spaces for NGO and private sector networks outside the basic education bureaucracy to carve their respective niches in.

In addition to these frameworks, the country has two landmark policy covers affecting basic education: the transfer, at least in theory, of the governance of basic education to schools through the 2001 Governance of Basic Education Act; and the promulgation in 2006 of the National Competency-Based Teacher Standards which aims to develop higher thinking skills and learning competencies.

The last 40 years also saw at least one major DepEd-related reform project every three years on the average. This number excludes smaller DepEd projects and those undertaken by the more than 60 NGO and private sector groups, some of which are represented here today.

Initiatives that Bloomed

Reviewing the reform projects, we realized many of them planted seeds of hope that sprouted wonderfully in the areas where they were implemented. Project IMPACT, or the Project on INSTRUCTIONAL MANAGEMENT BY PARENTS, COMMUNITY AND TEACHERS) is an example. It was initiated as a practical intervention  to address overcrowding in Philippine public schools, as well as the lack of teachers, textbooks, and other learning materials. Its notable features include: the supervision of as many as 120 students by one teacher; the active role of parents and other community members; the community rather than school focus of learning, the help extended by other primary students who were trained to teach specific lessons to beginning students; and the option of students to learn by themselves  or with a friend, neighbor, or in small groups once language skills had been developed.

At 50% reduction in education costs, IMPACT students acquired higher levels of cognitive skills compared to those in regular schools. They also demonstrated better social and communication skills, a greater sense of commitment, and overall leadership potential. The staunch education reform advocate in the National Economic Development Authority or NEDA, Mr. Nap Imperial, validated these observations. Project IMPACT has been re-launched as e- IMPACT. What puzzled us though is why the effective IMPACT technology of the 1970s was not used to address Metro Manila’s overcrowded public schools.

Unlike Project IMPACT, BEAM and the Third Elementary Education Project or TEEP reflected scale. Together, they implemented School-Based Management or SBM in 40 of the country’s 188 divisions, affecting more than 12000 schools or as many as a third of Philippine public elementary schools. As practiced in the Philippines, SBM is a framework that integrates school governance with various school level inputs for achieving equitable access to quality education. This includes changes in perspectives on learning, pedagogy, and community participation. BEAM and TEEP differed in many respects/ but they had remarkable outcomes.

BEAM aims to improve the access and education quality in three regions in Mindanao. Its underlying learning philosophy assumes the active construction by learners of their own knowledge through interactions with their natural and social environment. BEAM asserts that higher order thinking skills develop in flexible and cooperative learning classroom environments rather than in classrooms characterized by a one-way transmission of knowledge to passive learners. This explains BEAM’s focus on training in learner-centered management, teaching, and learning materials development.

The average scores of sample learners in the BEAM areas increased significantly across subjects through the years particularly in higher-order thinking skills. With regards to the enabling conditions for effective classroom learning, BEAM has established a management training system utilizing appropriate learning systems for Regional, Division, District, and School managers; effective teacher training; and a system of producing culturally-sensitive learning materials. BEAM has also forged partnerships with Teacher Education Institutions or TEIs and the National Educators Academy of the Philippines or NEAP.

In contrast to BEAM’s philosophical coherence TEEP was less mindful of its learning philosophy, although its more pragmatic and eclectic thrust incorporated some of BEAM’s social constructivist notions. The decentralization objective and research-identified determinants of desirable student outcomes rather than specific learning theories guided the formulation of TEEP. Hence, civil works and goods procurement were significant components of its reform program.

SBM iterated in TEEP. Since the consultant who fleshed out SBM in the ADB report on decentralized basic education management, joined TEEP subsequently TEEP did not have to invent the wheel. The number of schools that adopted SBM expanded exponentially within three years to all 8600 schools in 23 TEEP divisions. Like BEAM, TEEP’s SBM operationalization included the formulation of 5-year School Improvement Plans together with parents, communities, and other stakeholders. TEEP differed from BEAM however, because it drilled down SBM cash grants or MOOE to schools and its school heads supervised classroom construction within a 90-day cycle without any reported anomaly.

The student outcomes in the TEEP divisions are impressive. Although they started out with lower average scores in 2002, they consistently outperformed schools in provinces that were less poor. They also ranked as well, if not better, than schools in non-poor divisions, a performance TEEP schools sustained beyond project completion in 2006. Moreover, systematic targeting of disadvantaged schools also narrowed the gap between monograde and multigrade schools in TEEP divisions.

Reflecting on BEAM and TEEP, we strongly believe that combining the features of these projects is the fastest way to achieve the BESRA goal of implementing SBM nationwide. BEAM’s philosophically coherent educational interventions  would have a much higher probability of taking root if TEEP’s SBM strategy is used to till the soil. This means that in addition to community and LGU participation we propose the giving of direct accountability for SBM implementation to division offices and the drilling down of funds to schools. These would prepare systems for the shift in learning paradigms so that BEAM initiatives can grow and spread faster.  (First in a couple of parts.  For a detailed and complete content or transcription in acrobat format, just click this link, When Reforms Don't Transform)