Briones: Happy critic faces DepEd challenge

DepED Secretary Leonor Briones INQUIRER PHOTO / GRIG C. MONTEGRANDE

LATE-NIGHT Cabinet meetings just suit this silver-haired woman and the prospect of long and challenging travels on a habal-habal or even on horseback to reach schools in distant barangays or upland villages doesn’t intimidate her at all.

If there is one thing that Leonor Briones—chosen to head the Department of Education (DepEd), the government agency with the biggest staff and largest budget allocation—finds challenging, it’s waking up early to make it to a flag-raising ceremony or to a 10 a.m. meeting at her new office in Pasig City, she said.

“If I sleep at 3 a.m., you don’t expect me to wake up at 6 a.m. I don’t have any problem working late at night; it’s the daytime because we are expected to do our work during the day and meet at night,” Briones said with a chuckle in an interview with the Inquirer on Friday.

A night owl like President Duterte, Briones admitted that she was “coping with difficulty” in terms of adjusting her body clock to her new schedule.

But the public finance expert, who served as national treasurer and presidential adviser on social development during the Estrada administration, knew right from the start when she accepted Mr. Duterte’s offer to become education secretary that work will be difficult “because I am 75 years old.”

“It will be difficult physically for me but in a sense, I am doing this as tribute to my parents who were both teachers and to my mother, who, for me, started an alternative learning system in her own way during the war years,” she said.

Briones said she did not ask for the job and she did not expect it to fall into her lap either.

“I was not particularly needing a job because I was quite happy in Social Watch Philippines (SWP). I was teaching and I was chair of the board of two universities. My life was very fulfilling,” she said.

Happy critic

She was also “happy criticizing” the first batch of Mr. Duterte’s Cabinet appointments in a press conference when she received a call a few days later from an emissary offering her the job, she recalled.

Reluctant at first, she asked for some time to discern and to consult her family—her husband and her two sons, and their relatives. She also sought the advice of her colleagues at SWP, who all said it was her opportunity to bring her education advocacies to government level.

But she admired the President for selecting her “despite the fact that I was critical of his earlier Cabinet appointments and I was associated with a ‘maligned’ President,” she said.

“For me, it is an articulation of how I believe professionals should be treated in government,” she added.

Her appointment was lauded by many, including her predecessor, Armin Luistro, who had stated that Briones’ lifelong advocacies on education and her wealth of experience in public finance and administration will be favorable to the DepEd.

Game for travel

Being lead convenor of SWP also prepared her for the work ahead in the department.

Championing higher budget allocation for education, including alternative learning systems for the underprivileged, Briones had also traveled abroad and within the country, distributing computer sets and other learning materials on many occasions to far-flung schools, even in the country’s war zones.

When asked how she would manage to travel again, this time to oversee education programs in faraway areas, she answered: “As long as there’s an airport and it is scheduled.”

“In the mountainous parts, usually there is a habal-habal or we can ride a horse. I am still game [for that] but we will see. It’s my companions who are scared and won’t allow me,” she said, laughing.

Briones earned her bachelor’s degree in business administration, major in accounting, in Silliman University, where she graduated magna cum laude.

She finished her master’s degree in public administration at the University of the Philippines Diliman and received a postgraduate diploma in development administration, major in public enterprises, from Leeds University, England.

Alternative learning

Briones also earned certificates in policy for public enterprise and innovations in governance from Harvard University in Massachusetts. She was recently conferred the “honoris causa” doctor of public administration by Central Philippine University in Iloilo City.

Before her appointment, she was professor emeritus of National College of Public Administration and Governance at UP Diliman, chair of Silliman’s board of trustees, and chair-designate of Universidad de Manila.

Briones said the expansion of the alternative learning system (ALS) will be her banner program. She said there were still many Filipinos in the country and abroad who could not read and write despite the latest technology and the advent of social media.

Her passion for ALS was shaped not only by the advocacies of SWP but also by her mother, a teacher who religiously gathered the children from the mountain villages during World War II to teach them to read and write using banana leaves as paper and sharpened bamboo sticks as pencil.

“I was then 3 years old and I listened to the lessons which my mother imparted,” Briones said in her turnover speech last week. She also recalled that after the war, she went along with the children to be tested for their grade equivalencies and was promoted by two grades even if she was not enrolled.

Briones also vowed to oversee the continuation of the senior high school (SHS) program as part of the much-needed K-12 education reform program.

Singing for health

To be able to infuse more money into the SHS and ALS programs, she would direct the reconfiguration of the 2017 budget and form a task force that will scrutinize and streamline the procurement process in the department to fast-track public spending on education within six months, she said.

“There are many complaints about underspending, wastage and what we in the academe euphemistically describe as deviant bureaucratic behavior. A major culprit is delays in procurement,” she noted in her speech.

While she means business, she also promises to bring music once in a while to the department. Singing as a soprano, Briones is the president of the 65-year-old Manila Concert Choir.

For the last four decades, she has been performing and touring all over the country and the world with the group, crooning Filipino classics, church anthems and Broadway musical songs. Chorale singing is her secret to a healthier mind and heart, she said.

“Music exercises my whole system—the lungs, the mind and the soul. It is also very challenging because I am not good at pop music. If the song is not 100 years old, I don’t know it. I even ask the young ones in the group who is this Taylor Swift,” she said with a laugh.