Local, regional, national execs pledge more investments in ARMM education

MANILA, Philippines—In an unprecedented initiative, local government and education officials from the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao have come together with central government officials to invest more in the region’s education system and hold local communities more accountable for how their children are educated.

Some 40 mayors from Sulu, Maguindanao and Lanao del Sur signed a covenant with regional and national education officials to “transform ARMM into a learning community,” a move considered ground-breaking for a region where development has long been disrupted by conflict, violence and divisive politics.

Officials signed the covenant at the close of the daylong ARMM Education Summit held Thursday at the Ateneo Professional Schools at the Rockwell Center in Makati City.

“The kind of meeting that we had here cannot be underestimated because this will have a very big bearing on the future of the ARMM itself. Because while we say we are talking about education, it really has to redound to the whole region,” said ARMM Education Secretary Baratucal Caudang.

“I am confident that we’ll go a long way. Previously, there was none of this. We didn’t understand each other,” Caudang said in an interview.

The ARMM trails behind the rest of the country’s regions in achieving education goals, according to a presentation by University of the Philippines economics professor and Inquirer columnist Solita Monsod.

Monsod noted that, given the pace of its education reform implementation, ARMM will achieve 100 percent completion by its elementary school students by the year 2672. Currently, only 37.5 percent of ARMM elementary students finish the course, the worst of all the country’s regions.

As the population continues to be ill-equipped for employment, poverty levels have steadily risen in the last two decades. In 2009, some 45.9 percent, or almost half of ARMM’s population, were poor, according to Monsod’s presentation.

The covenant, which delegated tasks to local government units (LGUs) and education officials, underlined the importance of community participation in giving better education to children.

“We believe that it takes a village to raise a child, and education is a shared community responsibility. We believe that greater community involvement is a key strategy in successfully addressing the crisis facing our public school system,” said the covenant.

The role of the community is especially important for ARMM, noted Caudang, given recurrent security problems—teacher and student abductions and killings and other forms of violence—that only united communities could address.

Under the covenant, ARMM local government units or LGUs agreed to invest more in education, tap the budget of the youth and barangay councils and pass local ordinances that would institutionalize education reforms.

The pact also tasked LGUs to “reinvent local school boards,” a multi-stakeholder policy-making body, through encouraging greater participation from parents, business, civil society and people’s organizations.

The covenant called for more transparency from the regional and national governments, particularly in the release of the education budget, recruitment and promotion of its staff.

It also proposed a report card system where “community members can express their observations and suggestions to improve learning performance.”