Are Philippine schools ready for back-to-school?
Come mid-June, the school year is about to resume in the Philippines. These days, students are checking off their lists like crazy, and buying notebooks, pens, crayons, pad papers. They would be hunting for used books or borrowing from older friends and neighbors. Parents would be going to Divisoria to buy school uniforms for their students. After a long hot, usually boring summer, students are just itching to go back to school and catch up with their classmates and friends.
But are the schools ready? The Philippine Council for Investigative Journalism looked at several schools around the nation, and assessed the number 2 goal for the United Nation Millenium Development Goals (MDG): education. Here’s what PCIJ found:
Naga City is having trouble keeping children in class to complete elementary education. Only seven out of 10 students finished elementary education. This alarming situation occurs in a city where one third of the population is of school age. The city executives lost no time planning an initiative called Quality Universal Elementary Education in Naga (QUEEN) and hopefully we’ll see better numbers by the end of this year.
In Maguindanao, there are more class suspensions than actual sessions! One of the reasons - teachers are busy attending meetings elsewhere, and there aren’t enough teachers left behind to teach.
Las Pinas City Grade 6 students got the fourth highest score in the National Capital Region (NCR) for the National Achievement Test (NAT). However, Las Pinas has severe teacher-and-classroom shortage for several years now. It got so bad that some of the city’s public schools have three shifts of classes the growing number of students. Typically, Las Pinas classes surge to about 60 to 70 students per class, which is far from ideal for learning.
Overall, how does the Philippine school system fare? According to the PCIJ report, all key performance in education have failed since the Arroyo administration came to power in 2001. Of the eight MDGs, achieving universal primary education is among the goals that the Philippines admits it will unlikely to meet seven years from now. That is, unless, we do some drastic, lasting changes in our school systems nationwide.
We sure have a lot of homework ahead of us.
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June 18th, 2008 at 3:49 am
The answer is obviously in the negative, but the good thing is we are working on it. :)
September 22nd, 2008 at 9:16 pm
It’s really, really tough to enroll yourself into school these days. But hey! I have found a bicol school that offers a great education at an affordable cost. The SLTCFI in Legaspi City. Check it out…