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: Philippines
Of the many similarities between Donald Trump and Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte is the question of when one should take him at his word. Prone to bluster, he was serious…
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.…
To see the South China Sea tensions from where I sit, an emerging regional power is flexing its muscles by making increasingly bold gestures over dubious territorial claims. Those muscles…
The United States and the Philippines just signed the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA), for which The Philippines government has provided a FAQ that is worth a look. This agreement…
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…
I’ve spent the past seven years living in foreign countries, almost all of that time with my wife (who I met at very early in this journey) who hails 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.