My political consciousness of a wider world around me – a world larger than Deep South and America – coincided with the 1991 Gulf War. On one side of that…
Category: Asia
I’ve written two essays in the last two weeks warning about both the possibility of North Korean nuclear atmospheric testing and how there is little the US and its Northeast…
There is something remarkable and strange in the interviews with our Chief Executive-elect. Discerning the meaning of the contours of these peculiarities tells us something about the current political reality…
Sometimes you make predictions that you hope were wrong. One such prediction was my Red Dawn at Malacañang essay, written just after Duterte won the presidency in the 2016 election.…
I’ve just returned from a week-long trip to Chengdu for a final consultation with an NGO operated by a friend who I first met during my M.Ed research in the…
This is Part I of Hong Kong and the Anti-Cosmopolitan Moment, a response to Ivan Krastev’s Why Did the ‘Twitter Revolutions’ Fail? Ivan Krastev wrote an op-ed for the New York…
I wish to spend a moment drawing attention to what I’m beginning to call the phenomena of Middle Income Banana Republics, or MIBR (Mee-Bers?). The term is meant as one…
I wrote more than a year ago that there was little reason to worry that the Scarborough Shoal incident would turn into a war, as many feared, because the structural…
In passing, one of my best friends from China mentioned last year that he once cut down a tree on a forested mountain to pay school fees. He was from…
One of the keynote speakers for CESHK 2013 was the Dean of Teacher Education at Cebu Normal University, Filomena Dayagbil, who spoke about quality issues in Philippine education. Internal and external (TIMMS) testing showed that there has been a precipitous drop in math, reading, and science scores in the Philippines that show up in even short, year-to-year timeframes. She spoke about three new approaches to remedy the issues: a new policy to increase the length of schooling from K-10 to the more conventional K-12 system, the role of teachers colleges in increasing teaching quality, and change away from English Medium of Instruction to mother tongue instruction.
I found myself disagreeing with the overall framing of educational quality issues in the Philippines. In general, it’s difficult to disagree with the idea that teachers can and should be better or that K-12, under the right conditions, would make the Philippines more academically competitive. But this ignores the fact that expanding enrollment rosters without increasing funding to go with it would likely decrease quality even further. This is exactly what has been happening over the past two decades, as successive Philippine governments failed to adequately prepare for a population boom. A 2009 New York Times article summed up the issues very succinctly:
According to the World Bank, the Philippines spends $138 per student per year. By comparison, Thailand spends $853 per student, Singapore spends $1,800 and Japan spends $5,000. The Philippine government spends 2.19 percent of its budget on education, according to official figures, well short of the 6 percent that educators say is optimal — despite a constitutional mandate to make education a priority. At the start of the decade, educators talked of a radical overhaul of the education system, but the main change since then has been increasingly intense overcrowding, Mr. Luz, of the policy study institute, wrote in a recent paper.