Group tasked to evaluate high schools' performance

CEBU, Philippines - Cebu City Mayor Michael Rama has assigned people to look into the quality of education being provided in Cebu City’s public high schools after the vice mayor raised concerns about the results of the Filipino Intelligence Test (FIT) wherein only three schools got a passing rate.

Rama said he will tap former Cebu City mayor Alvin Garcia, former city councilors Jocelyn Pesquera and Manuel Legaspi, Department of Education – Cebu City Division Superintended Rhea Mar Angtud and the Local School Board to evaluate the performance of schools.

Rama said he wants to see when the city can come in to improve quality education in public high schools in Cebu City so the graduates they produce will be more ready for college.

Vice Mayor Joy Augustus Young recently disclosed that only three out of 62 public high schools in Cebu City passed the FIT in 2011.

They were ranked based on the scores of their students who took the exam as one of the requirements to become a city scholar. The exam was supposed to determine the readiness of the students to take courses in college.

Those who ranked low are only eligible for vocational courses or immediate employment programs. Students who fall in the two other categories are those who can take ladderized programs and those who can take baccalaureate programs respectively.

Last year, when the exam was still divided into three categories, about 70 percent of the students fall in the lowest category which means they could not survive any four-year course.

In this year’s FIT, the city divided the categories into four. This year’s FIT results showed that 43 percent of students can only take vocation courses, 32 percent can only take ladderized courses, 14 percent may take baccalaureate courses with medium difficulty level while 11 percent may take any courses including the major courses such as engineering and medicine, among others.

There were 5,860 high school graduates from 65 public high schools in Cebu City subjected to the psychometric test this year.

The ranking of schools in the recent FIT is yet to be released by the scholarship committee.

Rama said that he also wants to know how Cebu City if fairing compared with other urbanized cities.

Rama said that there are many distractions that could be affecting the children’s concentration like computers and other modern gadgets. Rama said he wants to know how the schools and the city government can help the parents swerve their children away from these distractions.  (FREEMAN)