Restore Grade 7, plus 1 year in HS

Eighteen million students troop back to 42,000 public schools on June 6. Expect politicians to ululate on its eve what everyone already knows and they must solve but aren’t: sinking quality of education; shortage of books, classrooms and teachers; perhaps even a move of school opening to Sept. to avoid the typhoon months. It’s an annual ritual, akin to the mystic five-year cycle (1990, 1995, 2000, 2005) in which Congress raises a howl about jueteng, then simmers down for the next publicity stunt. Nothing gets resolved. The ills of free mass education remain the same. For, they fail to take stock of the core issues.

Those issues can be summed up into two: higher funding and longer schooling.

The State simply has to invest more for each schoolchild. Thailand spends $900 a year on average for each youth in elementary or high school. Most developed nations devote $1,600 a year per student. The Philippines plunks a dismal $145 (P7975), much of it for teachers’ pay, book printing and classroom construction. Out of that sorry sum must come the equally important teacher training, instructional aids and computers. But nothing’s left. No wonder that, in the 2003 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Survey of 45 countries, Filipino students fared miserably in second-year high school competencies. In Math, they ranked 41st, nosing out only South Africa, Ghana, Botswana and Saudi Arabia. In Science, 42nd, never mind who they beat.

That year Boston College conducted TIMSS tests as well for Grade 4 elementary school competencies in 25 countries. Filipino pupils rated 23rd in both Math and Science, edging out only Tunisia and Morocco. The top five ironically are Philippine neighbors: Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea and Japan (which tied with Britain). Those countries block off 20-25 percent of their annual budgets to education. The Philippine allocation is only 12 percent. The culprit in low TIMSS ratings is certainly the teacher. Assessments of Filipino public school teachers in 2004 showed poor skills in English, the language for Math and Science instruction. Education Sec. Florencio Abad Jr. laments that only 10,000 of 51,000 teachers scored higher than 75 percent. The 41,000 failures either did not know enough what they teaching or could not teach good enough. They need to go back to the classroom.

Along with them must return 1.2 million 2004 Grade 6 elementary graduates who were found unprepared for high school. Only 8,000 of them (0.6 percent) had scored 75 percent or higher in the High School Readiness Test. The median grade between the higher and lower scorers was at only 31 percent. The Dept. of Education rushed a bridging program in which an extra year would be added so they can catch up with high school’s rigors. But only 150,000 availed of the voluntary classes. Parents of the rest cried against added expenses and for hustling them through high school so they could work and help out the penurious families – as if the kids would ever be employable with their low scholastic achievements.

Adamant Abad has mandated longer remedial class hours for that 2004 batch, now coming into second year. A similar test of 1.6 million Grade 6 grads in March 2005 had a higher 16 percent scoring 75 or better, and with the median grade at 54 percent this time. That improvement has not deterred DepEd from batting for additional years for all elementary and high schools.

The longer a child stays in school, the more is learned. That truism stems from international studies on brain focus within a classroom’s four walls. Thus, developed countries have adopted a standard eight elementary grades and four high school years. This is in addition to pre-school, nursery and kindergarten to which responsible parents enroll their toddlers.

In response to the 2004 fiasco, President Gloria Arroyo had ordered all local governments to allocate funds for kindergartens. Richer cities did better by injecting nursery curriculums in barangay day-care centers. Undersecretary Chito Gascon hails the initiative, but calls on Congress to adopt the international standard of 12 years schooling. For this, he suggests restoring Grade 7, which President Ferdinand Marcos had scrapped in the late ’70s, and a fifth year in high school.

DepEd anticipates another outcry from parents whose children must be saved from their short-sightedness. So it has talked with private schools, which are only too willing to break up their already stiff syllabuses into 12 years from the present ten. Private initiative is what the ill-funded DepEd has been depending on these past years. Its Brigada Eskuwela, now on its third year, had 375,000 volunteers cleaning up and repairing 20,000 school buildings on May 12-21, thus saving DepEd P1.2 billion in man-hours and materials.

A head start of the 12-year standard in private schools will widen all the more the learning gap with public school youths. But it’s a temporary pain from which the country eventually will gain. Ululating legislators will finally realize that they must plow more money into education, from pork barrels perhaps, so their poor constituents can have the same opportunities in life as the private school products. From there, the country can then catch up with the rest of the world.

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