No more excuses

By Butch Hernandez
Philippine Daily Inquirer
Filed Under: Poverty, Education


IN HER Foreword to the 2010 Education For All Global Monitoring Report (EFA GMR), Unesco director general Irina Bokova said that “rising poverty levels mean that the challenge of meeting basic human needs is a daily struggle. Lessons from the past teach us that children are often the first to suffer—as is their chance to go to school.”

One of the tools that the EFA GMR uses to determine a country’s progress is the EFA Development Index or EDI. Its indicators are the four most easily quantifiable EFA goals, namely, universal primary education, adult literacy (first part of goal 4), gender parity and equality, and quality. The EDI value for a given country is arrived at via the arithmetic mean of these four goals. An EDI of “1” means the country has fully achieved.

Lets start with the good news first.

The 2010 EFA GMR finds that the Philippines together with Fiji, Indonesia and Malaysia, is “in an intermediate position with an EDI between 0.80 and 0.94.”

And now the bad news.

The EFA GMR also says that in 2007, 9 million primary school-age children were out of school in the East Asia/Pacific region, mostly from the Philippines (1 million), Indonesia (500,000), Cambodia and Thailand (about 250,000 each).

More alarmingly, around 25 percent of those who do go to school drop out before Grade 5 due to poverty and location, “with the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) and some outlying islands falling far behind the national average. Many poor and vulnerable households [have] to cut back on education spending or withdraw their children from school.”

Furthermore, in the Philippines, Cambodia, the Lao People’s Democratic Republic and Burma, 9 percent to 14 percent of pupils drop out of the first grade; only 54 percent to 73 percent of children enrolling in primary school reach the last grade. School retention is particularly poor in the Philippines.

These figures have remained rather constant for the past five years.

What has this led to? A rising number of adult illiterates: over 1.4 million in the Philippines and 1.2 million in Vietnam.

The EFA GMR says that globally, “literacy remains among the most neglected of all education goals, with about 759 million adults lacking literacy skills today. Two-thirds are women.” The report adds that “millions of children are leaving school without having acquired basic skills.”

It seems that the Philippines has been a disappointment, because “achieving Universal Primary Education by 2015 should have been a formality, given its wealth level and starting point at the time, and there is now a real danger that, without decisive political leadership, the country will miss the goal. Education indicators for the Philippines are below what might be expected for a country at its income level. Extreme poverty and regional disparities are at the heart of this.”

Aside from conventional poverty indicators, EFA GMR also looks at “Education Poverty,” which it defines as “young adults aged 17 to 22 who have fewer than four years of education. They are unlikely to have mastered basic literacy or numeracy skills.”

Young adults with fewer than two years of education, who are likely to face extreme disadvantage in many areas of their lives, including health and employment, fall under the “Extreme Education Poverty” category.

“Despite the progress of the past decade, absolute deprivation in education among 17- to 22-year-olds is extraordinarily high in Cambodia and Myanmar [Burma], and remains significant in Indonesia, the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, the Philippines and Vietnam,” says the UN report.

Let’s now take a look at international assessments such as the TIMSS (Trends in International Math and Science Study) and the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment.

The PISA is given to eighth graders (or 2nd year high school students). It assesses achievement in reading, mathematical and scientific literacy, “not merely in terms of mastery of the school curriculum, but in terms of important knowledge and skills needed in adult life.”

In 2003, PISA added an additional domain of problem-solving: “to continue the examination of cross-curriculum competencies.”

The UN report says that “evidence from international assessments of reading skills is even more disturbing. Among the East Asian and Pacific countries included in the 2006 assessment, the proportion of students performing at or below level 1 of the reading literacy scale ranged from less than 6 percent in the Republic of Korea to 58 percent in Indonesia.”

We would have benefited greatly from international assessments like TIMSS and PISA. Our neighbors in the region surely did. Unfortunately, the Philippines participated in neither the 2006 PISA or the 2007 TIMSS, for a variety of reasons.

So now we know what we have suspected a long time ago: Philippine education is reeling largely from self-inflicted wounds.

In his opening remarks at the launch of Education Nation’s 10-point Agenda (Inquirer, 1/23/10), Ramon R. Del Rosario of the Philippine Business for Education (PBed) said “It is time that we demand of our government leaders at all levels to demonstrate their genuine concern for the plight of millions of Filipino children. Our country deserves quality education for all. We demand it. We will watch over it. We shall fight for it. No more excuses.”