Gov’t think tank: Make education stats public

BLENDED SYSTEM Teacher Jermaine San Agustin teaches biology in Taguig City to 12th graders both in school and at home. —INQUIRER FILE PHOTO

Data on school performance in the country should be announced regularly by an independent body to help improve the quality of education, according to a study published by the think tank Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS).

“Just as we regularly generate information and report on labor market outcomes, inflation, or national income accounts, we should regularly report on the performance of our schools on which the future of our nation depends,” said PIDS president Aniceto Orbeta Jr. and research fellow Vicente Paqueo.The report said that being transparent about school performance would support in generating empirical analysis of test scores, school and home characteristics for public policy, and also help inform household decisions on schooling.

It cited the country’s performance in international assessments which, according to Orbeta and Paqueo “confirms we have been in a learning crisis for a while now.”

4-year-old studies

In the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) which evaluated the reading comprehension of 15-year-old students, the Philippines ranked the lowest among 79 countries. In the 2019 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), the Philippines also ranked the lowest among 59 participating countries.

Orbeta and Paqueo said that while the country continuously conducted national achievement tests (NAT), the results were “never granularly available” to be used for in-depth analysis or public decision.

“When the Pisa and TIMSS results were released, they were a wake-up call. We could have been warned and acted earlier had we released, analyzed and publicly discussed the NAT results we administer almost every year,” they said. INQ

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