Overextended and underfunded, public schools are at the bottom of the academic ladder.
by Yvonne T. Chua
AT THE Old Balara Elementary School in Quezon City, it is a constant struggle to keep students in class. Were it not for the dedication of teachers, who keep tab of pupils who drop out, and then take every effort to find out why they are not going to school and encourage them to return, many more young people in the slums of Balara would not be able to learn how to read or write.
"Just bring them back," school principal Felisa A. Beran tells her teachers, some of whom have been there for 20 or 30 years. For Balara, a bustling squatter colony located on a piece of government land that lies between the country's most elite schools, the University of the Philippines and the Ateneo, the struggle against school absenteeism is really one against poverty.
Most of Balara's students live in shanties and their parents barely eke out a living. "Walang pamasahe, walang baon. Kawawa ang mga bata, nagugutom sila (They have no money for jeepney fare or to buy food. The poor kids, they're always hungry)," Beran says. But so far, the school, which has about 3,500 pupils, has a zero dropout rate. To encourage the children to continue with their studies, 150 students have been put on a supplementary feeding program. In addition, those who miss class receive remedial lessons after regular school hours at the clinic-cum-faculty lounge or at the corridors.
Since her appointment as principal in August 1999, Beran has tried to make the school more conducive to learning. She repaired the covered walk, installed an exhaust fan at the stuffy canteen, and got a condemned toilet working again. The new shelves at the library still smell of paint. The dilapidated chairs that pupils used when school opened in June are gone—replaced by more than 500 plastic armchairs that Beran persuaded the schools division office to buy in September, and by chairs donated by nearby universities.
In addition, volunteers from Ateneo high school teach pupils science, math and English.
But Beran concedes that some things are hard to fix or can't be fixed at all. And this is where even the most ardent and dedicated of public school educators face a dead end. While neighboring Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore are spending millions to educate their workforce in an effort to compete more aggressively in the global economy, the Philippines is saddled with an educational system hobbled by lack of resources, mismanagement and corruption.
Meanwhile, the country loses out to the competition. Even as Singaporean and Malaysian grade-school students are being initiated to the wonders of information technology, Filipino schoolchildren don't even have textbooks or desks. The disparities are not only regional but also national. A growing gap separates not just the Philippines from its more affluent Southeast Asian neighbors, but also Filipino public school students from their counterparts in private schools. These disparities in education exacerbate the yawning gap that already separates rich and poor in the Philippines, and sentence to a lifetime of poverty millions of Filipino children who have to make do with the crumbs left on the education table.
The dismal state of affairs is evident at the Balara elementary school. Ideally, the school's 26 classrooms should take in less than 2,000 pupils, with half of them going to class in the morning and the other half in the afternoon. Instead, to accommodate all the students, the school holds classes in three four-hour shifts for first to fourth graders and two six-hour shifts for those in the fifth and sixth grades. A new multistory building with more classrooms is out of the question: The school's 200-square-meter lot rests on an aqueduct. Finding a new school site is next to impossible in a district where property prices have skyrocketed in recent years.
The three shifts have resulted in shorter contact time between teachers and pupils. Grade school pupils should be in the classroom at least six hours instead of four. In addition, anywhere from 50 to 80 pupils are packed like sardines in small rooms that are poorly ventilated and covered with roofs that leak when the rains come. With help from parents, the school recently attained a 1:1 textbook-to-pupil ratio. This means that each pupil has one textbook in just one subject when there should have been seven textbooks to a child to cover all the subjects taught in school.
No wonder the school performed badly in the National Elementary Achievement Tests (NEAT). Principal Beran concedes that the combined efforts of the school staff and the support of nearby universities "are not enough to make up for the learning the children lost from Grades 1 to 4." Taken together, two hours of learning given up every school day for four years means the children of Balara had each lost 1,600 hours of schooling.
Given these kinds of conditions, it is not surprising that the gap between public and private schools is widening. The annual achievement tests give an indication of the disparity. In 1998, private schools scored 62.09 in NEAT and 52.10 in the National Secondary Achievement Test (NSAT), against the public schools' 48.96 and 43.36, respectively.
It is wrong to conclude that private schools do better than public schools chiefly because private education is elitist and expensive, says Roberto Borromeo, president of the Fund for Assistance to Private Education (FAPE), an organization that helps in the development of private schools. "Private education," he says, "is not Ateneo, La Salle or Southridge."
In reality, a third of the country's more than 4,000 private elementary and high schools face the same kind of resource problems that burden public schools. Most private schools are small (enrolment of 200 to 500 or less), charge little (annual tuition of P2,500 or less) and are run by Catholic or Protestant missions. They barely survive on tuition, the government subsidy that comes by way of educational service contracting (ESC) or tuition fee supplements, and the support they get from the community and their organizations.
Still, a FAPE study shows that these private schools, many of which take in children who otherwise would have gone to public schools under the ESC, produce better students. Their 1996 NSAT score is 138.08 compared to the public schools' 114.25 in 1996. Why the gap?
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