Expanding the definition of our education enterprise
(Excerpted from the “Economics of Education: Notes for Philippine Education Reform” lecture delivered by University of the Philippines professor Mario M. Taguiwalo at the recent Unesco Roundtable on Economics of Education.)
We should begin by conceiving our nation’s education enterprise as something beyond our schools and universities to include our families, communities, media, churches, arts and culture and workplaces.
The leadership of the education secretary in matters concerning the formation and enhancement of Filipino human capacities should reach beyond our schools to include all institutions and enterprises that provide knowledge, influence attitudes and create skills.
Once we begin to recognize the educational impacts of all these institutions, we will move rapidly to improve these impacts.
Give much greater attention to mother tongue education
Our families, communities and schools where our many mother tongues are spoken are the true nurseries of the educated Filipino.
In these mother tongue communities, foundational learning is being acquired without much attention and support from education professionals and other educated Filipinos. It is important that disciplinary learning in the mother tongue be improved so that habits, emotions, feelings, images, narratives and frames acquired by Filipinos in their mother tongues provide them with strong foundations for future learning in other languages.
Cultural and literary output, journalistic and media coverage, and scientific knowledge and information all in mother tongues are important to support mother tongue education. Local governments and local employers may be best in supporting this.
Expand training sponsored by employers
Millions of young Filipinos, both college graduates and dropouts, are unemployed and never had any experience in formal employment. This lack of formal employment experience is a major gap in the education of our young citizens.
We should create an opportunity for most young Filipinos to have at least six months to one year of work experience in formal employment mainly as training in the habits, attitudes, and values of working in productive organizations.
This will motivate young people to make further investments that can increase their longer-term employability and give employers the opportunity to teach young people the capacities they seek in their workers.
Educate parents to value competencies, not credentials
In the public education essential to implementing the proposed K+12 schooling cycle, it is critical that the Department of Education (DepEd) educate parents to focus on competencies rather than credentials.
Most parents do not understand the difference between someone with a high school diploma and someone with the competencies expected of a high school graduate. Effort must be exerted to demonstrate to Filipino parents the social and economic value of competencies actually acquired independent of credentials that supposedly signify the presence of those competencies.
The ability of Filipino parents to become better investors in the education of their children will be crucial to the success of education reform. It is very important for parents to understand the presence or absence of essential competencies at each stage of the education cycle.
Increase parents’ power in choosing their children’s schools
The DepEd needs to increase the role and participation of parents in deciding which schools their children attend. Increased funding should flow to schools that are more popular with parents.
School level management and leadership should be strengthened to respond to parents’ demands. Parents should be able to choose whether to take a government voucher to a private school or let their children attend a public school of their choice.
Increase linkage between education research and teacher education, hiring and promotion.
Many teacher education institutions do little or no education research. Teacher hiring and promotion are organized and managed with little or no information from education research. Whatever education research is being undertaken is hardly used to guide teacher education, hiring or promotion.
Teacher performance can improve if education research is increasingly linked to teacher education, hiring and promotion.
Use sports and culture to link schools and communities
It is clear that the development of the human capacity involves not just academic experience but also sports and cultural experience. But sports and culture are best promoted at community levels rather than at schools.
The school and community link might best be cultivated by the engagement of school children with other children in the community through sports and culture.
Local governments and local employers can support chorale competitions, dance competitions, team sports, cultural festivals and local celebrations that engage all children of the community.
Make poor families better investors in their children’s education
The antipoverty program of government might be seen as helping poor families to become better investors in the education of their children.
The conditional cash transfer (CCT) program creates incentives for poor families to keep their school-age children in school. The provision of better family planning and maternal care services enables poor families to space and limit their childbearing so they can better invest in the children they do have.
These programs will yield greater results when the rest of the education enterprise become even more effective in providing neural binding in those areas crucial to human capacities.
Keep increasing effectiveness of public spending in schooling
Public spending in schooling is the most visible portion of our economy’s investment in human capital.
It is hardly the only investment of our people in education and, in all likelihood, private spending on education is far greater than public spending. Yet the evidence of effectiveness from current public spending in schooling is not very encouraging.
It is crucial for the long-term credibility of Philippine education leadership of the DepEd that it maintains a robust scientific effort to track and measure the continued effectiveness of public spending in schooling through a large and active monitoring and evaluation effort, coupled with a wide variety of instructional and other innovations being tried and tracked.
