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Report No. 28063-PH

Philippines

Education Policy Reforms in Action:

A Review of Progress Since PESS and PCER

Human Development Sector Unit

East Asia and the Pacific Region

The World Bank

May 2004

Abbreviations and Acronyms

|ADB |Asian Development Bank |

|ARMM |Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao |

|AusAID |Australian Agency for International Development |

|BEAM |Basic Education Assistance for Mindanao |

|BEC |Restructured Basic Education Curriculum |

|CHED |Commission on Higher Education |

|COE-COD |Centers of Excellence and Centers of Development Program |

|CSIs |CHED Supervised Institutions |

|DBM |Department of Budget and Management |

|DBP |Development Bank of Philippines |

|DepEd |Department of Education |

|EDCOM |Congressional Commission on Education Reform |

|ESC-TFS |Educational Service Contracting–Tuition Fee Supplement Program |

|EFIP |Educational Facilities and Improvement Project |

|FAPE |Fund for Assistance to Private Education |

|GASTPE |Government Assistance to Students and Teachers in Private Education |

|HEDP |Higher Education Development Program |

|HEI |Higher Education Institution |

|INSET |In-service Training |

|JICA |Japan International Cooperation Agency |

|LGUs |Local Government Units |

|NCCE |National Coordinating Council for Education |

|NEAT |National Elementary Achievement Test |

|NEDA |National Economic Development Authority |

|NEETS |National Education Evaluation and Testing Service |

|NSAT |National Secondary Achievement Test |

|ODA |Official Development Assistance |

|PAQTVET II |Philippines-Australia Quality Technical Vocational Education and Training Project (Phase II) |

|PCER |Presidential Commission on Education Reform |

|PESS |Philippine Education Sector Study |

|PhP |Philippine Peso |

|PTTAF |Policy, Training and Technical Assistance – Capacity Building Program in Tech-Voc Education |

|RBEC |Restructured Basic Education Curriculum Program |

|RLF/FL |Regional Lingua Franca Pilot Project/First Language |

|SEDIP |Secondary Education Development and Improvement Project |

|SEMP |Social Expenditure Management Project |

|SUCs |State Universities and Colleges |

|TEEP |Third Elementary Education Project |

|TESDA |Technical Education and Skills Development Authority |

|TESDP |Technical and Skills Development Project |

|TIMSS |Third International Mathematics and Science Study |

|TSDF |Technical Education and Skills Development Fund |

|TVET |Technical and Vocational Education and Training |

|USAID |United States Agency for International Development |

Acknowledgements

This report was written by Elizabeth M. King, Lynnette de la Cruz Perez, Mario Taguiwalo, with Yolanda Quintero, in consultation with representatives from key Philippine government agencies, the academe, and research institutions: Juan Miguel Luz, Cristina Padolina, Lourdes de Vera, Tess Felipe, Napoleon Imperial, Susan de la Rama, Jean Tayag, Susan Carandang, Joel Flores, Yolanda Quijano, Rosario Manasan, Ester Albano Garcia, and Edita Tan. We are grateful for their generous inputs. We also thank Peter Moock for his early comments; and Cynthia Manalastas and Sabrina Terry for their administrative assistance. Supervision from Emmanuel Jimenez, Robert Van Pulley, and Christopher Thomas is gratefully acknowledged.

Table of Contents

Executive Summary

1. The context 1

2. objectives 2

3. The record on policy priorities and actions 3

Basic Education 3

The Setting 3

PESS/PCER Recommendations 4

Actions 5

Program of Instruction 5

Targeting Disadvantaged Populations 5

Using Private Sector Capacity 6

Increasing Textbooks 7

Improving Teacher Effectiveness 7

Assessment 7

Higher Education 8

The Setting 8

PESS/PCER Recommendations 9

Actions 9

Rationalizing and Mobilizing funds 9

Rationalizing the Structure of Tertiary Education 10

Upgrading Quality of Teaching and Research 10

Assessment 11

Technical-Vocational Education and Training 11

The Setting 11

PESS/PCER Recommendations 11

Actions 11

Strengthening Quality Assurance Functions 11

Providing the Poor Access to Quality Programs 12

Devolving Training Functions 12

Assessment 13

Across the Whole Education Sector 13

The Setting 13

PESS/PCER Recommendations 13

Actions 14

Assessment 14

4. Making Progress on Education Priorities 15

Strategic Implementation: Starting Easy and Building on Success 15

Broad Support for Specific Recommendations 16

An Institutional Environment for Change 16

Political Will for Change 18

Tables and Figures

Table 1: Student performance on mathematics and science tests: 1

Ranking among 38 countries

Figure 1: Gross and net enrollment rates in East Asian countries, 2000 1

Figure 2: Trends in NEAT and NSAT scores 2

Figure 3: Education enrollment and completion rates 4

References 20

Executive Summary

For decades, the Philippines could boast of being one of the most highly educated developing countries. Its enrollment rates at all levels of education were higher than those of other countries with comparable, or even higher, income levels. But any edge that the Philippines might have had in its human capital has been eroding as more countries in the region – Thailand, Malaysia, and Vietnam, as cases in point – have achieved higher levels of education and have invested in a more skilled labor force. Moreover, quality of delivered instruction and levels of educational outcomes attained by students differ widely across different regions of the country, between rural versus urban areas, and among different types of schools (public or private, central or peripheral, complete or incomplete).

In recognition of these education problems, three major reviews have been conducted in the past decade, each culminating in a long list of recommended priority actions: the Congressional Commission on Education (EDCOM) of 1991, the Philippines Education Sector Study (PESS) of 1998, and the Presidential Commission on Educational Reform (PCER). As a result of EDCOM, three separate government agencies with more focused mandates now govern education: basic education is managed by the Department of Education; higher education is managed by the Commission on Higher Education (CHED), and technical and vocational education (TVET) is governed by the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA). PESS and PCER recommended other actions: ensure adequate financing and improve the quality of basic education; slow and reverse the haphazard expansion of low-quality tertiary institutions; provide equitable access at all levels so that deserving poor households and communities can benefit from public education provision; and improve overall sector management through greater local participation and accountability. While some progress has been made with respect to these recommendations, those that

require fundamental changes in current structures and relations within the educational system remain current.

Basic Education

In the past decade, there have been a number of important gains in improving basic education. Policy actions have mitigated input shortages in textbooks and school buildings, particularly in the poorest provinces. A new generation of instructional policies, especially the more focused basic curriculum, lays the foundation for better learning, provided that adequate material and systems support sustain the full implementation of these policies. Renewed attention on private sector participation can complement the delivery of basic education, particularly at the secondary level, in cases of lack of capacity. But progress is largely incomplete: real per-capita government spending on basic education continues to lose ground to population growth and inflation; the Department of Education has barely started to address the difficult task of increasing the productivity of a large teaching force. Very few fundamental institutional changes have been introduced to improve systematically the management effectiveness of the national agency and the entire organization.

Higher Education

The uneven distribution of higher education institutions across the country and increased reliance on fees in higher education have been used as the rationale for the mushrooming of low-quality state colleges and universities. Given that the needs of basic education have greater priority and that there is no guarantee that increased public funding will yield better quality or more equitable access to higher education, recommendations have focused on the need for a more efficient, equitable and strategic use of limited public funding for higher education, with the expectation that private institutions can then carry the main burden of meeting student demands, coupled with a more targeted program of college and university scholarships. A moratorium on the establishment of state colleges and universities and a rationalization of the creation and conversion of new state colleges and universities have been recommended—and indeed, CHED has slowed down the rapid growth of low quality state institutions. The share of tertiary education in total government spending for education also has been contained, and the best institutions have been deregulated with many moving ahead with their own quality improvement efforts.

Some major gaps remain, however. The creation of new SUCS still threatens to speed up due to political interests in the nation’s legislature. There has been no change in the targeting of scholarships. Little progress has been made on teacher development considering the system’s high demand for better teacher competencies. Even the best SUCs are unable to generate significant levels of self-financing.

Technical-Vocational Education and Training

The country has a wide variety of technical-vocational education and training (TVET) options, mostly in the private sector, but wide variations in quality exist among these programs and offerings while the patterns of demand for skills constantly change. In many respects, the problems and constraints reflect the failures in basic education outcomes or the limitations in admissions to higher education. The recommendation with respect to this sub-sector has been to rely primarily on private providers so that programs can respond more quickly to the market, and to use public financing mainly to induce private providers to deliver high-quality programs. PESS recommended an education service contracting scheme for providers and a development fund to assist private providers toll up for offering TVET courses. TESDA has focused correctly on the overall improvement of quality, efficiency and equity of all programs across the board, rather than only on its own—but the full transformation of TESDA from provision to monitoring, evaluation, regulation, and financing TVET is not yet complete, with budget constraints being a significant problem.

Major Challenges Remain

Given evidence of constancy of purpose through political changes (e.g., textbooks in basic education), capacity to implement tough decisions despite political resistance (e.g., some rationalization of SUCs), and willingness to change for greater effectiveness (e.g., TESDA’s shift to quality assurance in TVET), why has there not been more progress in other vital areas? There was clearly no substantive progress in creating mechanisms for sector-wide accountability, leadership, and planning; in improving teacher productivity and utilization; in greater efficiency in schools; in increasing the quality of SUCs; or in focusing public spending on scholarships.

Strategic implementation. The recommendations do not provide adequate guidance to policy makers nor do they help policy makers prioritize the actions. They may not have been specific enough or prioritized enough. They may not have provided clear implementation scenarios or identified the trade-offs required to implement the reforms. Sequencing and timing are going to be affected by a number of factors, including availability of required resources, existence of supporting organizational structures, and degree of political risks involved, that determine which recommendations are going to be deemed as feasible and which are the least costly. Strategic implementation recognizes the linkages between the reforms and uses breakthroughs in one area to create breakthroughs in other areas, but the implementation of many reforms has failed to take advantage of these types of synergies.

Broad support for specific recommendations. Reforms are more feasible and sustainable if there is political consensus on, and broad support for, the recommended changes—among the key implementers of the reform, among the wider education community, as well as within the national population. Some recommendations were contested by national education stakeholders even at the time of the deliberations.

An institutional environment for change. Basic institutional reforms that are necessary for the specific recommended reforms to be implemented are missing. For example, the education sector needs a champion for reform whose accountability is the performance of the whole education sector and whose institutional interest is the efficient, coordinated functioning of the whole system. The current lack of an integrated leadership in the education sector cripples the ability of the policymakers to act strategically across the sub-sectors. Also, the system does not yet have accountability mechanisms to address the loose connections between the implementers for change and the beneficiaries of that change. Transferring some decision making and implementation authority closer to schools which are likely to benefit most

can intensify and sustain push for change, but the nation has continued to reject including education in its decentralization reform. And though a national education information network can improve greatly the management of the education system, information collection throughout the system remains naïve and sporadic (especially in comparison with other countries), and information, when available, is used ineffectively.

Political will for change. The key feature characterizing the above environment for change is a prevailing illusion that education reforms in the Philippines seem discretionary, a “nice to have” initiative that can be pursued voluntarily when conditions and timing are right. There does not seem to be a widely shared sense that education reforms are a vital necessity, a matter of survival for the education system, an imperative imposed upon the nation due to decades of inaction or inadequate effort.

1. The context

For decades, the Philippines could boast of being one of the most highly educated developing countries. Its enrollment rates at all levels of education were higher than those of other countries with comparable income levels (Figure 1). As a result, the export of professionals, technicians, and other skilled workers has been a lifeblood for the economy. A recent magazine article portrayed this colorfully:

At any given time, about 10 percent of the country's 76.5 million population is hard at work - outside the country. During 2001, more than 800,000 people headed out on a commute that makes Rye-Grand Central seem like a milk run to the corner store. They went to Italy, Saudi Arabia, Canada, Singapore, and Uzbekistan. They went to Mongolia and Equatorial Guinea. Unlike Mexicans, who flock primarily to the United States, Filipinos traveled to 162 nations in all …as domestic helpers, engineers, nurses, bricklayers, teachers, farmers, seafarers, stenographers, hairdressers, crane operators, cooks, and entertainers. … Remittances, the money they electronically send back to their families, account for 8.2 percent of the nation's gross national product, stabilizing its peso, improving foreign currency reserves, shoring up consumption, and making more than a dent in the unemployment rate (now 11.1 percent). Last year, overseas Filipino workers sent home $6.2 billion. Indians sent home twice the amount - with 13 times the general population (Wired, 2002).

But any edge that the Philippines might have had in its human capital has been eroding as more countries in the region – Thailand, Malaysia, and Vietnam, as cases in point – have achieved higher levels of education and have invested in a more skilled labor force. China, with its ample supply of cheap labor, poses a formidable threat to these smaller economies with respect to labor-intensive export industries. To face up to this threat, the smaller economies in the region (as well as those in other world regions) must build up their comparative advantage in terms of a more highly skilled labor force. Indeed, students in Asian countries have performed extremely well in international standardized examinations on mathematics and science (Table 1). But in the 1999 TIMSS tests of eighth-graders in 38 countries, the Philippines ranked far behind its neighbors.

These results are consistent with other data on the quality of basic education. The results of national exams themselves indicate that students are not learning the curriculum—only slightly more than one-half of students pass these tests (52 percent in elementary education and 53 percent in secondary education) (Department of Education, SY2000/01) (Figure 2). In addition, while enrollment rates appear high, completion is only at 66 percent at the elementary level and 48 percent at the secondary level.

For the Philippines to sustain its competitive edge in the global economy, it will need to raise its national average in key educational competencies in comparison with other countries, and at the same time, it will need to reduce the lower range variation below that national average. These two goals are consistent with each other but not automatically achieved together. To achieve these two goals, the Philippines must make its basic education schooling system, which has already succeeded in reaching the vast majority of school-age children, much more effective in yielding educational outcomes for the most disadvantaged children, by securing higher educational achievement from each year of schooling particularly in the first four years (which are at this time the only years of schooling that a large segment of youths get), by increasing the average number of actual years in school so that more children complete the primary level and more children transition to secondary level. Improving the quality of basic education graduates is a key input to better tertiary education. There are many other issues related to improving tertiary education but the most critical ones revolve around the effectiveness of tertiary education in preparing teachers for basic education, and around the competing claims on public funding for tertiary education that, to some extent, reduce the level of public resources for basic education.

These messages are not new. The Philippines Education Sector Study (PESS) of 1998, a joint study by the Philippine government, the Asian Development Bank, and the World Bank, and the final report of the Presidential Commission on Educational Reform (PCER) which was created in December 1998 by Executive Order No. 46 (2000) raised these issues, inter alia, and identified key priority actions for addressing them. The key recommendations of the PESS included: ensure adequate financing and improve the quality of basic education; slow and reverse the haphazard expansion of low-quality tertiary institutions; provide equitable access at all levels so that deserving poor households and communities can benefit from public education provision; and improve overall sector management through greater local participation and accountability. The PCER report identified nine very specific components of a future agenda for reform that pertain to all levels of education and touch upon similar areas as do the PESS recommendations. While some progress has been made with respect to these recommendations, those that require fundamental changes in current structures and relations within the educational system are still relevant.

2. Objectives

This paper reviews the progress in implementing the key operational and policy directions set out in the PESS, and the PCER, and other education programs in the sector, such as the Education for All initiative; discusses the factors that might explain the amount of progress achieved; the findings of education sector performance review, with emphasis on the key issues, gaps, constraints, challenges confronting the sector, including the results of the assessment of the progress in actual implementation of key reform recommendations; the medium-term growth prospects; the Government plans for the sector; the priorities and view of key stakeholders; and lessons from programs and operational initiatives. It aims to understand the thrust of education reforms, the main motivators and drivers of such reform directions, and the chief sources of influence, initiative and management. This will be done by assessing progress in actual implementation of PESS and PCER recommendations, reviewing status of other competing or complementary policy initiatives, identifying shifts in directions and critical factors that have contributed to, or deterred, progress. This will also be done by appraising the current thinking of key stakeholders in education reform within government, in strategic academic and other social institutions like media, among major players in education reform from the private and non-government sectors.

3. The record on policy priorities and actions

SINCE THE PESS AND PCER, THE ARROYO ADMINISTRATION HAD SUCCEEDED THE ESTRADA ADMINISTRATION; THREE SUCCESSIVE SECRETARIES OF EDUCATION HAVE HEADED THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION, AND FOUR DIFFERENT SECRETARIES OF ECONOMIC PLANNING AND TWO SECRETARIES OF BUDGET HAVE PROVIDED POLICY DIRECTION TO THE BROAD FINANCING AND MANAGEMENT OF THE WHOLE EDUCATION SECTOR. APART FROM CHANGES IN THE POLITICAL LEADERSHIP AFFECTING THE EDUCATION SECTOR, THERE HAVE ALSO BEEN SIGNIFICANT CHANGES IN THE OVERALL ECONOMIC SITUATION OF THE COUNTRY AND IN THE CORRESPONDING FISCAL CONSTRAINTS OF THE GOVERNMENT. SINCE EDUCATION OCCUPIES SUCH A LARGE SHARE OF TOTAL GOVERNMENT SPENDING, THE CHANGING FISCAL FORTUNES OF GOVERNMENT GREATLY INFLUENCE THE TIMING, SCALE AND SCOPE OF POSSIBLE INITIATIVES IN THE SECTOR.

This section tracks and updates the thinking within the principal education agencies – the Department of Education (DepEd), the CHED and the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA) – about the main challenges in the sector and about recommended policy actions. In each of the respective areas of basic education, higher education, and technical-vocational education and training, as well as in matters that cut across these areas, the key PESS and PCER recommendations are summarized, the principal actions on these recommendations reviewed, and the current status of the reform directions assessed.

The information contained in this section comes from documents and interviews with key informants in the principal education agencies, in NEDA, DBM and donor partners such as ADB, AusAID, JICA, UNICEF and USAID, as summarized in a background note (Quintero 2003) for this paper.

Basic Education

The Setting

The main outlines of the basic education situation are well known. The Philippines has succeeded in achieving close to universal participation in Grade 1, exerting tremendous effort just to accommodate a growing number of cohorts of new school entrants each year. Drop-out and repetition rates in the 6-year elementary cycle, however, are significant and have persisted for more than four decades since the 1960s. Rates of completion at Grade 6 are low and achievement levels of those completing elementary schooling are considered unsatisfactory (Figure 3).

There has been rapid expansion in high school enrollment since the 1990s when universal free secondary education was implemented. But since transition rates from elementary to high school, though slightly higher, are still low and drop-out rates are significant, the rate of high school completion for children who entered grade 1 is less than 50 percent (Figure 3). Achievement rates of graduates of the full ten-year (elementary and high school) basic education cycle are also deemed unsatisfactory. There has also been an even more recent trend towards increased public sector share in secondary education enrollment, reversing a long standing feature of a large and vigorous private sector in secondary education. Despite all these, a significant portion of graduates from the basic education cycle attains sufficient levels of achievement to enable them to proceed to higher education.

But quality remains a problem. There is wide variation in quality of delivered instruction and levels of educational outcomes attained by students from schools in different regions, in rural versus urban areas, of different types (public or private, central or peripheral, complete or incomplete) and even from among different sections of the same grade level within the same school.

PESS/PCER Recommendations

The PESS recommended the following urgent and priority initiatives in the immediate to short term: address the textbook shortage in basic education by reducing inefficiencies in the acquisition, provision and use of this basic input; target new investments in elementary education to benefit disadvantaged areas and groups; improve teacher effectiveness; encourage multi-grade instruction through compensation supplements; carefully manage new public investments and education service contracting for secondary education to make effective use of existing private sector capacity; and improve the efficiency of communications among different levels of basic education. The PCER recommendations focused on strengthening teacher competencies through in-service training and expanding options for medium of instruction in Grade 1 using regional lingua franca or the vernacular.

These two sets of complementary recommendations point to pursuing a few selected incremental efficiencies that might be easily attainable yet yield tremendous benefits in such a gargantuan enterprise as basic education: better use of available funding for textbooks; increased productivity of teachers, particularly those assigned in the most disadvantaged settings; better targeting of new public investments to benefit the poorest and to make use of private sector capacity; and improve organizational communications as one strategic aspect of more effective management; introduce curriculum and medium of instruction changes to facilitate learning.

Actions

Program of instruction. To improve efficiency of student learning in the critical first two years of elementary schooling, a policy to use the regional lingua franca or vernacular was piloted in 1999 and eventually was implemented more widely in subsequent years. In 2002, a new Restructured Basic Education Curriculum Program (RBEC) was launched. The new intended curriculum introduced a number of key changes, including reduction in the number of subjects and increased allocation of contact hours for instruction in core subjects. Meanwhile, the Multigrade Program, introduced by the Department of Education several years ago was further strengthened through the Multigrade Program supported byof UNICEF and UNDP, had been introduced since 1994 in some 130 schools that enroll some of the most disadvantaged children. There are plans to expand this cost-effective program to cover additional disadvantaged students and schools.

In all these initiatives – teaching the first two years using regional lingua franca, implementation of BEC and expansion of the Multigrade Program – the policy decisions had been taken but the appropriate teacher training, provision of appropriate textbooks, adjustments in instructional supervision and development of student assessment tools still lagged considerably behind. In a sense, these policy actions are still in the process of implementation.

Targeting disadvantaged populations. DepEd had also been implementing major public investment projects partly financed by external donors, which are targeted to benefit disadvantaged communities. The Third Elementary Education Project (TEEP), with funding support from the GOP, World Bank and JBIC, targeted investments in 22 poorest provinces. While the project funding was included in the total budget ceiling of DepEd, the project allocations for each project province became an additional spending for the locality supplementing its regular budget allocation. In this sense, TEEP spending for each province effectively increased per capita public spending for elementary education in project provinces. TEEP provided support for school building construction (with counterpart spending of local government units) and repair and maintenance, decentralized in-service training of teachers, and for school-based innovations and initiatives. Provincial level educational management capacities were also targeted for improvement. At the national level, TEEP provided funding for the expansion of textbook procurement and provision of essential school furniture.

Unlike decisions on policies concerning curriculum or instruction such as BEC and the Multi-grade Program, which have been made but still have to mobilize sufficient resources necessary for their full-scale adoption, investment projects like TEEP are able to support specific policy directions directly by providing incremental resources for their implementation. Implementation of investment projects, however, can be slowed down by limited institutional capacities or management difficulties. The slow implementation of TEEP which led to the earlier cancellation of a significant part of its funding is a case in point.

Aside from TEEP, DepEd has also been implementing the Secondary Education Development and Improvement Project (SEDIP), which is financed by government and ADB. The project covers 26 poor provinces and is much more directly school-targeted than TEEP, which works through provincial school divisions. SEDIP provides schools with incremental inputs such as school building construction, school equipment, textbooks, in-service teachers training, among others. Similar to TEEP, it has encountered slow start-up and delays in implementation that required a scaling down of project funding.

The Social Expenditure Management Projects 1 and 2 (SEMP and SEMP 2) financed by the World Bank not only provide funds to supply textbooks, equipment, and teachers’ manuals, build schools and classrooms, and train teachers but also support improvements in the implementation of core management systems including financial management, procurement, management information system and human resource management systems (teacher deployment in particular). The combined procurement of textbooks under SEMP, together with the requirement for textbooks financed by the TEEP, showed a continuing trend of lower prices for government procured textbooks, despite increasing standards for quality of paper that should lead to longer average useful life for textbooks. The reform components on the Basic Education Information System and teacher deployment have also shown early signs of resulting in significant policy changes.

Other poverty targeted investment projects are currently being implemented such as the AusAID-funded Basic Education Assistance for Mindanao (BEAM). BEAM focuses on the needs of the indigenous and Muslim population of Mindanao in three regions. Some projects in the DepEd pipeline include the Educational Facilities and Improvement Project for ARMM (EFIP), supported by the JICA, which is being developed by the government for implementation in 2004-2005.

The Philippine Out-of-School Children and Youth Development Program, supported by a Japan Social Development Fund grant administered by the World Bank, is a program to pilot a number of prototype programs, which brings together government, civil society, and private sector to offer alternatives to out-of school children and youth to return to formal basic education and participate in alternative learning systems for their basic as well as technical education. A number of out-of-school children and youth have been given the opportunity to re-enroll in school to continue their basic education. However, a small percentage of these beneficiaries were forced to drop out from school due to their inability to fund ancillary needs not covered by sponsorship. These efforts have also not been mainstreamed into the education system as a whole.

Using private sector capacity. Little had been done earlier along the lines of mobilizing private sector capacities and resources for basic education. For example, the "Adopt-a-School Program", already legislated some years back, was operationalized only in late 2002 with the approval of the tax-credit benefit for private sector donations to public schools. DepEd expects a much more vigorous response from the private sector with this development. Recent community-based response to the school maintenance ("Brigada Eskuwela") program has been very encouraging, with many parents and communities providing donated goods and volunteer labor to maintain school buildings. A private sector initiative, the "Education Revolution", has recently been much more active in providing a wide range of resource augmentation and enhancements to public schools. A number of local businesses which are members of the League of Corporate Foundations have individually and as a group embarked on education initiatives to augment limited public resources. Projects usually took the form of scholarships to poor but deserving students, public school teachers, and private school teachers focusing on math and science education, as well as the provision of much-needed education resource inputs such as school furniture, equipment, building construction or repair, and teacher-training.

More effective use of available private sector capacity to provide education has also lagged. For example, the expanded Government Assistance to Students and Teachers in Private Education (GASTPE) program, which include the Educational Service Contracting and the Tuition Fee Supplement mechanisms, continues to operate with the same rules and weaknesses that were analyzed and recommended for revision in the PESS in 1998. DepEd has shown renewed interest in addressing the problems of GASTPE with new proposals for its coverage expansion, increase in its payment rates, and more attention to its monitoring and evaluation. A proposal to extend GASTPE to the elementary level is under review.

Increasing textbooks. The reduction in number of subjects for instruction mandated by the BEC (fewer textbooks needed) and selected changes in textbook specifications resulting in lower costs had set the stage for a major improvement towards greater adequacy of textbooks. Improved procurement procedures sustained through three different DepEd administrations allowed the funding of increased quantities of textbooks. However, problems with respect to textbook distribution and delivery, quality and choice of textbooks and multiple titles remain serious challenges. Innovations in wider public participation to monitor textbook deliveries, such as the recently-initiated ‘Textbook Count Project’ of the DepEd, help is expected to assist in solving this problem. DepEd expects to attain a one textbook per student ratio on all core subjects within the 2003-2004 school year, although this may not yet pertain to the same one textbook per student because some classes still use two to three approved textbooks for the same subject. Nonetheless, this is quite an achievement in a very short period.

Improving teacher effectiveness. Some important initiatives have been undertaken towards improving teacher effectiveness, including the numerous in-service teacher training (INSET) activities conducted under DepEd through various sources. However, the overall impact on learning outcomes of basic education students has not been significant. The need to regard teacher education and development as a continuum is an imperative that needs to be translated into concrete actions. While some commendable approach reorientation has been initiated, such as the TEEP focus on school-based training needs of teachers, a more coordinated and holistic teacher and education development program approach has yet to be put in place.

The teacher deployment study under SEMP 2, which set the use of color-coded maps indicating teacher-surplus and teacher-shortage schools, triggered a string of reform actions from division and district officials to improve teacher deployment in their respective areas and has the potential of setting an objective criteria in the rational allocation of teacher resources between and among schools. However, the Magna Carta for Teachers is still viewed as an insurmountable legal barrier to the full implementation of some of the proposals for reform.

While some DepEd programs in the past included the provision of instructional materials and other important references to teachers, these have not been commensurate with the large requirements of teachers, in light of the growing number of students, curriculum changes, and changing competency requirements.

Improvements have been made on the efficient and fair administration of the teacher payroll, which have been welcomed by the teacher workforce. Justifying the positive link between salary grade adjustment and education performance, DepEd recently put forward a proposal to the DBM requesting for the salary grade adjustment for District and Education supervisors. Also, new training programs have been introduced at the National Educators Academy of the Philippines to improve the management skills of principals, supervisors and superintendents.

Assessment

In all, there are a number of important gains. Policy actions have mitigated some of the worst input shortages in textbooks and school buildings, particularly in the poorest provinces. A new generation of instructional policies could lay the foundation for more effective learning provided that adequate material and systems support sustain the full implementation of these policies. Renewed attention to creating conditions for private sector participation both in supporting public schools as well as in complementing delivery of basic education, particularly in secondary education, should generate wider positive response.

On the downside, there are some very stark reminders that progress towards the recommendations of PESS and PCER is largely incomplete. Although DepEd receives the largest budget among government departments, real per-capita government spending on basic education continues to lose ground to population growth and inflation as it decreased from PhP 399 in 1997 to PhP 370 in 2000 and PhP 353 in 2001 (Manasan, 2001). Meanwhile, the exodus of students from private to public schools continue unabated and, in secondary education, an 80 to 20 split in enrollment in favor of private schools just over a decade ago has been reversed in favor of public schools, putting even greater stress on limited public resources. With 87% of annual budgets allocated for personnel, mainly teachers, DepEd has barely started to address the difficult task of increasing the productivity of this large workforce. Very few fundamental institutional changes have been introduced to improve systematically the management effectiveness of the basic education organization.

Higher Education

The Setting

The relatively small portion of the student population that enter higher education faces a wide variety of choices in courses and institutions, with a corresponding array of costs and prices. Courses offered by different institutions vary considerably in quality and price. Geographic availability of higher education choices are wide in several metropolitan areas of the country, limited in some provincial and regional urban centers, and may be non-existent in many smaller towns and cities. Private higher education institutions have responded very well to student demand although increasing costs and higher prices have made higher education a major financial investment for the average Filipino family. The uneven distribution of higher education institutions across the country and the increased financial burdens of higher education borne mostly by families have been used as the rationale for the growth of low quality state colleges and universities as well as for the expansion of publicly funded scholarships. Public funding for higher education, however, had grown at the loss of more funding for basic education without satisfactorily yielding adequate outcomes in terms of increasing access to higher education by the poor or of improving the quality of course offerings available in localities or of making available more science and technology courses critical to the country.

The problem of quality is not isolated to basic education. At the tertiary level, there is ample evidence also of substandard quality. To cite one, a newspaper article on the quality of nursing education (Adversario, 2003) had this to report:

At an interactive forum among nurses at a recent congress, a nurse voiced his concern: “The problem is not limited to the shortage in human resources… Clinical and laboratory facilities have also not expanded with the increased enrollment. All these contribute to a poor quality of education and consequently, poor quality graduates, who inevitably have a low chance of passing local and foreign board exams. Based on figures from the PRC, the percentage of candidates who pass the board exams has declined in recent years. Consolidated results from 1994-1998 showed a passing rate of more than half at 57 percent. In December 2002, those who passed the board dipped to 43.6 percent, down from 52.58 percent in the same period in 2001. Results from the local licensure exam given in December 2002, showed that out of 223 nursing schools, 136 schools posted a passing rate of below 50 percent. None of the graduates from some 39 schools even made it.” (The Manila Times, April 22, 2003).

PESS/PCER recommendations

The PESS recommended a moratorium on the establishment of state colleges and universities and the PCER also recommended rationalization, within a moratorium period, of the creation and conversion of new state colleges and universities. The PESS recommended that tertiary education institutions be weaned from public funding sources, while the PCER recommended that the premises of public funding of tertiary education be re-oriented towards meeting student demand, greater equity of access, and program considerations, under a system with improved efficiency and accountability. Apart from these two recommendations shared by PESS and PCER, the PESS recommended also a more targeted program of college and university scholarships while the PCER recommended the establishment of a one-year pre-baccalaureate program between high school and college to strengthen the preparation of high school graduates, and a program to accelerate development of college-level faculty with the required post-graduate credentials.

The main focus of these two overlapping sets of recommendations is the more efficient, equitable and strategic use of limited public funding for tertiary education, with the expectation that private institutions can then carry the main burden of meeting student demands that are not congruent with the narrowly targeted public financing goals in this area.

Actions

Rationalizing and mobilizing funds. In the 2001 budget, the share of higher education relative to aggregate government expenditures in education declined from its 2000 level. This could reflect the results of discreet attempts by DBM to rationalize resource allocation using performance as indicator, in contrast to earlier practices of determining SUC budget allocations based on increments to past budgets. To further improve on these efforts, CHED has been working on a study to develop an alternative funding formula or unit cost norms, and new institutional typologies. This study would ultimately come up with definitive criteria for allocating limited government resources to SUCs based on quality and relevance of programs and access to these programs by the poor. CHED is also in the process of conducting studies on innovative cost recovery measures (e.g., socialized tuition, democratization of fees), means testing schemes, and an appropriate socio-economic index. A proposed law to allocate financing on a per-student basis is awaiting legislative approval.

Proposals to institutionalize cost recovery schemes and maximize utilization of commercial assets of SUCs have had limited implementation. A few SUCs initiated new revenue generating measures such as offering fee-based extension services or generating incomes from use of some assets, while others opted to retain their internally generated revenues, as provided for in the Higher Education Modernization Act of 1997. Most SUCs, however, did not avail of the latter option because it would have reduced their next-year subsidy from the national government. A number of SUCs felt that, with a reduced subsidy, they did not have sufficient capacity nor assets to sustain the increase of their revenues and fully cover their operating expenses. Reduced subsidy to SUCs was met with opposition in the legislative chambers as well, particularly from those who had SUCs within their jurisdiction.

Direct financial assistance to student access to higher education is done through the Improved and Expanded Scholarship Assistance Program, which is a continuation of several long running student assistance programs. The Program did not incorporate the recommendations made by the PESS with respect to targeted scholarships, especially focused on the poor but deserving students. CHED is conducting a study to elaborate a student index (that will be piloted with financial support from the ADB), and the development of private sector loans to deserving students who will be guaranteed a job after graduation. Although the Government responded positively to the last initiative, the current economic situation of the country limits the interest of the private sector to promote these schemes. There is also a proposal for commercial banks to offer student loans.

Rationalizing the structure of tertiary education. A moratorium on the creation of new SUCs was actually adopted. This was not strictly enforced, and was in fact reversed as evidenced by the increase in the number of SUCs, from 108 in 1998 to 113 in 2002. A number of legislative bills have been filed in the present Congress seeking to convert and/or create more SUCs. There has also been a rise in the number of local community colleges established by Local Government Units, which is allowed under the Local Government Code. These local community colleges, which are not under the supervision and control of the CHED, are seen to impede the laudable efforts of CHED to rationalize offerings and financing of public HEIs.

CHED also moved ahead with developing new types of institutional relationships with various categories of higher education institutions (HEIs). It adopted policies to extend a Grant of Autonomy and Deregulated Status to selected private higher education institutions that meet certain criteria. This program aims to encourage the best HEIs to achieve quality beyond minimum standards and to allow the CHED to focus its limited supervisory resources on the lower end of the quality spectrum of HEIs.

CHED acted vigorously to integrate and consolidate the CHED-supervised Institutions (CSIs). These small public higher education institutions were passed on either to existing SUCs or to the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA) according to their actual program offerings and proximity to a SUC. Among a total of 102 CSIs, 101 have been integrated to either TESDA or an existing SUC. This has generated cost savings through economies of scale and specialization, apart from preventing the eventual conversion of some of these institutions into new SUCs in the future. Resistance to the implementation of CSI rationalization, occasionally exacerbated by delays in the release of budgets of integrated CSIs, has led to attempts at political intervention. Some CSIs persist on seeking to be upgraded to state universities and there are reports about a move in Congress to reverse the integration policy.

An important initiative that aims to change the structure and management of higher education is the Higher Education Development Program (HEDP) project to be supported by the ADB. It includes components to rationalize the system of higher education through: (i) the development of normative financing (based on outputs instead of inputs) and the adoption of procedures of risk financing management; (ii) the rationalization of the number, distribution and growth of SUCs through advocacy at different levels, the adoption of minimum standards for conversion, the development of classification of HEIs, and the development of alternative models of governance; and (iii) the introduction of flexibility in the regulatory framework by freeing qualified institutions from regulations and close supervision.

Upgrading quality of teaching and research. CHED has been implementing two programs in support of this goal. First, the Centers of Excellence and Centers of Development Program (COE-COD) has been supporting and providing incentives to institutions with a high level of excellence in research. The Program also provides extension to help competing HEIs reach world-class levels. These institutions are identified with the assistance of technical panels and are granted broad autonomy. Funding comes from the Higher Education Development Fund (HEDF) with a total cost of PhP 47 million, 90% of which is devoted to scholarships.

DepEd is presently conducting a study to determine the feasibility of establishing a “bridging year”, or a fifth year for those students entering high school. The final document is expected before the end of 2003. Proponents of the one-year pre-baccalaureate program between high school and university as recommended in the PCER and PESS reports, highlight the need for a more intensive information drive to gain support for this important initiative from various sectors.

Assessment

The above review points to some progress. CHED has slowed down the rapid growth of low quality state institutions. The share of tertiary education in total government spending for education has been contained. The best HEIs have been deregulated with many moving ahead with their own quality improvement efforts. And CHED has acquired additional technical capacity, greater prestige and authority, more influence and a clearer position of leadership in the higher education sub-sector.

Some major gaps remain. The creep on the creation of new SUCS and local community colleges still threatens to speed up once backsliding is allowed to proceed. There has been no change in the targeting of scholarships. Little progress has been made on teacher development considering the system’s high demand for better teacher competencies. Even the best SUCs with many commercially valuable assets and with courses in high demand are still unable to generate significant levels of self-financing.

Technical-Vocational Education and Training

The Setting

To meet the training needs of a population with limited access to higher education and a large pool of potential workers with only high school education or even less, a wide variety of technical-vocational education and training (TVET) options emerged mostly in the private sector and eventually augmented by the public sector. But wide variations in quality exist among these TVET programs and offerings while the patterns of demand for skills constantly change. In many respects, the problems and constraints in TVET are largely affected by either the failures in basic education outcomes or the limitations in admissions to higher education.

PESS/PCER Recommendations

The PESS recommended an education service contracting scheme for TVET providers and a development fund to assist private providers toll up for offering TVET courses. The PCER did not have a priority recommendation that was specific to TVET.

The main thrust of PESS recommendations and, by implication, of the PCER silence on TVET is to rely primarily on private providers to respond to the market for TVET. Limited public financing of TVET should be directed to inducing private providers to deliver programs consistent with policy-determined targets.

Actions

A number of significant actions were undertaken by TESDA in response to the PESS and PCER recommendations. TESDA is redefining its core mission as setting direction in the subsector (policies, information, and labor market intelligence), quality assurance (quality provisions, competency, and training standards), and TVET provision and support. It is also building institutional capacity for TVET providers. It has established corresponding action areas and is matching projects and programs with them.

Strengthening quality assurance function. An important gain achieved by the TVET subsector is the premium given to quality assurance, that is, ensuring that outputs meet the minimum standards of competence that workers need to perform a particular job. This is achieved through program registration and accreditation, as well as through assessment and certification, of centers and trainers of TVET programs. A competency-based education and training program as the new learning methodology in TVET provision allows an assessment of learning based on competency performance of industry standards. The system is ‘open’ in that it allows open entry and exit from the TVET system, and provides national recognition and accreditation of acquired competencies by registered program providers.

TESDA has developed Centers of Technical Excellence (CenTEx) for pilot-testing the competency-based training system. These centers are developing 41 TVET institutions across the country to serve as models for all providers and demonstration areas for the introduction of new learning systems. As vehicles for reform, the centers are being developed in their identified Distinctive Areas of Competence through improvements in infrastructure and equipment, provision of support services such as capability building through trainers development, curriculum and training materials development.

The strengthening of TESDA as a policy development, quality assurance, and oversight agency is supported also by a technical assistance loan from the ADB, the Technical and Skills Development Project (TESDP), at a total cost of US$90 million. TESDP began implementation in 2002; to date, seven private providers have applied for credits. It has four components that contribute to the implementation of the PESS’ recommendations: (i) Enhancement of the management capacity of TESDA as an oversight agency through the registration, accreditation and equivalency processes, and the enhancement of private skills training; (ii) Devolution of training to local levels and private sector; (iii) Establishment of the Technical Education and Skills Development Fund (TSDF) in alliance with the Development Bank of Philippines (DBP); and (iv) Improvement of equity by establishing a scholarship program that makes loans to poor students in rural areas.

Besides TESDP, the Philippines–Australia Quality Technical Vocational Education and Training Project (Phase II) (PAQTVET II), supported by AusAID, establishes an industry-led approach to develop a quality-assured technical education and skills development framework to guide the transformation of TVET organizations, policies, and practices. This gives a greater role and a higher level of participation to the private sector about the guidelines for the provision of technical education within the country. The TESDA-GTZ Project being assisted by the German government, meanwhile, focuses on the development of 27 public and private beneficiary institutions along their Distinctive Areas of Competence. Assistance in the form of equipment outlay, capability building and training materials development are being done under this project.

Providing the poor access to quality programs. TESDA’s PESFA Scholarship Program aims to provide poor but deserving students access to quality TVET through enrollment in private TVET institutions. It gives limited scholarships since the budget for the program is being funded out of the regular MOOE funds of TESDA. The TESDA-ADB Scholarship Program is similar in nature to the PESFA Scholarship but includes enrollment in public institutions. Its scholarship fund, an expansion of an existing program, will target a total of 20,000 students from public technical and vocational institutions for a five-year period.

Devolving training functions. TESDP funds are also being used to prepare institutions for the devolution of training functions along with funds of Policy, Training and Technical Assistance – Capacity Building Program in Tech-Voc Education (PTTAF) through a grant from Canada. Since 1999, PTTAF has been supporting TESDA in its role of enhancing the institutional capacity of local governments and private providers. It is developing tools to assess the readiness of partners (local governments and NGOs) in assuming responsibility of TVET activities. So far, provincial governments have shown their interest in co-managing training schools and centers. However, local governments argue for the need for further assistance due to the lack of current technical capacity to manage these programs. A major implementation problem for TESDA, however, has been budget cuts due to the fiscal deficit. The agency could not provide the counterpart funding required by its donors, which, in turn, affected project implementation.

A Tender Scheme was launched by TESDA aimed at directing TVET enrollment on priority sectors/occupations through program tendering to selected institutions. Under this scheme, institutions are being offered tenders to implement a particular program on behalf of TESDA. Industry Working Groups, on the other hand, were established for four of the 15 identified priority sectors of TESDA, namely, tourism, health, ICT and agri-business. This is envisioned to help in addressing demand-supply gaps through the identification of priority programs for TVET as well as ensure market/industry relevance.

In an effort to rationalize program offerings, the DepEd and TESDA, through a Memorandum of Agreement, transferred the secondary programs of TVET institutions under TESDA to the DepEd. Governance programs, meanwhile, were developed to prepare TVET institutions for the eventual devolution of training functions to the LGUs. Governance plans were already prepared that defined the various phases of devolution by the institutions.

Assessment

It is encouraging to note that TESDA, CHED and DepEd have successfully delineated their agencies' respective jurisdictions without excessive turf disputes. TESDA has focused correctly on the overall improvement of quality, efficiency and equity of all TVET provisions across the board, rather than only on its own direct TVET provisions. On the other hand, the full transition of TESDA from provision to monitoring, evaluation, regulation and financing of TVET is not yet complete. Budget constraints are preventing the faster development of TVET programs. The accreditation process is still lacking while faculty development still leaves much to be desired. The low societal regard for middle-level manpower, compounded by the less supportive hiring, training and promotion policies in the country is also hampering the growth and development of the sub-sector.

Across The Whole Education Sector

The Setting

As a result of the implementation of the recommendations of the 1991 Congressional Commission on Education (EDCOM), three separate government agencies with more focused mandates now govern three sub-sectors of education. The largest and most crucial sub-sector is basic education which is managed by DepEd. Higher education is now managed by CHED. TVET sub-sector is governed by TESDA.

PESS/PCER Recommendations

The PESS recommended that an institutional focal point be established for setting priorities across the whole sector and for establishing consistent rules for financing and management across all levels of the education and training system. The PCER recommended three concrete measures to provide effective sectoral governance across all areas of education: a national coordinating council for education to coordinate policies and plans; a national educational evaluation and testing system to measure educational outcomes; and adoption of common standards for accreditation applicable for various disciplines across different educational levels.

The thrust of these recommendations is to create a source of central influence or an institutionalized mechanism for strategically directing the reform and development of the whole education sector without diminishing the authority or accountability of each agency to directly manage the affairs of each respective sub-sector.

Actions

The Estrada administration formally established the National Coordinating Council on Education (NCCE) through Executive Order No. 273, immediately following the PCER launching in 2000. The NCCE was supposed to fill up the policy vacuum resulting from the trifocalization of the education sector and was designed to coordinate and harmonize the cross-cutting education issues, formulate sectoral policies and priorities, and decide on the rational allocation of resources across different parts of the education system. To date, however, the NCCE remains inoperative. The formal convening of the body and constitution of its high-powered Technical Secretariat was not considered a priority of its first rotating Chair. Most of the actual coordination among education sub-sectors have occurred informally. No formal decisions binding on the whole education sector are made and issues are resolved by consensus or compromise, often independently of considerations of existing policy.

Funding for the NCCE was supposed to be sourced from the General Appropriations Act but because of its non-operationalization, funding in subsequent years was not pursued. Consequently, the planning of the entire sector continues to be fragmented and the conduct of initiatives and resolution of issues that cut across the three levels are not undertaken efficiently. The determination of the growth rates of the appropriation for each level over a time period remains contentious because of the lack of agreed developmental bases for subsectoral allocation. As originally envisioned, one of the tasks of the NCCE was to convene the first National Congress on the State of Philippine Education by 2001 to assess the fulfillment of all program and policy recommendations of the EDCOM and PCER (Imperial, 2003).

The Professional Regulation Commission, which administers and enforces the regulatory policies of the national government, including the maintenance of professional standards, has not been modified or improved. Little progress has been made in terms of the accreditation system, given the complexity of the task due to the huge number and variety of existing higher education programs and institutions. Equivalency, as a cross-cutting issue, requires the participation of different agencies. So far, there is only one agreement for accreditation criteria and guidelines for technical training on industrial skills (except for information and communication technology). Thus, the goal of establishing mechanisms and regulations to facilitate the move from post-basic education and training to university education is far from complete.

The establishment of the National Education Evaluation and Testing Service (NEETS), as recommended in the PESS and PCER reports, has not progressed in view of the non-operationalization of the NCCE. Considerable technical work has been undertaken on the planning for improved student assessment systems.

Assessment

Despite having the biggest share in total national government expenditures, real capita spending on education declined from PhP 486 in 1997 to PhP 451 in 1999 and down to Php 447 in 2001, as government spending in education failed to keep pace with rising inflation and enrollment expansion.

A set of implementation problems is common to all the programs but is especially acute for foreign-assisted projects: First, the already mentioned budget cuts. Second, the lack of continuity of project administration and the change in focus of the agency due to frequent changes in leadership. Third, the lack of continuous training of the staff, which along with the frequent shift of personnel makes it difficult to deal with the varied requirements of different donors. This is aggravated by the lack of equipment that limits the possibilities of electronic procurement. Fourth, the lack of a permanent project management office to administer the projects.

4. Making Progress on Education Priorities

Important gains towards directions recommended by PESS and PCER were achieved in the last five years from 1998 to 2002. The successful elimination of serious textbook shortages in basic education demonstrated the government’s ability to solve a major problem through three changes in leadership at the DepEd. The containment of further growth of SUC claims on the total public education budget demonstrated an exercise of political will in a difficult area of reform. The definite although incomplete transition of TESDA towards quality assurance and oversight role in TVET, from its previous over-emphasis on direct delivery of training services, demonstrated a healthy capacity to withdraw from activities of limited impact to those with strategic importance in sectoral effectiveness.

Yet given these evidence of constancy of purpose through political changes (e.g., textbooks in basic education), capacity to implement tough decisions despite political resistance (e.g., SUCS rationalization), and willingness to change for greater effectiveness (e.g., TESDA’s shift to quality assurance in TVET), why was there not more progress in many other vital areas?

There was clearly no substantive progress in creating mechanisms for sector-wide accountability, leadership, and planning. Very little progress could be observed in improving teacher productivity and utilization, or in institutional changes for greater efficiency in the basic education delivery organization. While further claims by tertiary education on the public budget have been contained, little has been accomplished in terms of obtaining increased policy-consistent outcomes from existing public spending on tertiary education either on SUCS or on scholarships. It is also not yet evident that changes in the policy and program environment of TVET will significantly improve outcomes in this area.

Several factors likely explain the limited implementation of the various policy recommendations of PESS and PCER in the last five years and of similar earlier efforts. Some of these factors were identified by key national stakeholders during interviews for this report, and some emerged during team discussions. This section discusses these different factors, with the intention of obtaining feedback from education stakeholders during a consultation workshop in June.

Strategic Implementation: Starting Easy and Building on Success

Criticisms about the content of the recommended reforms are unavoidable. The recommendations may not have been specific enough or prioritized enough. They may not have provided clear implementation scenarios or identified the trade-offs required to implement the reforms. If so, then the recommendations do not provide adequate guidance to policy makers nor do they help policy makers prioritize the actions. These criticisms may or may not be valid—but even if they are true, they are not sufficient to preclude action. After all, the recommendations, which were products of long discussions and deliberations by key stakeholders, are subject to interpretation and could be modified during implementation.

What get in the way of effective implementation are factors that may not be directly related to the validity of the recommendations themselves, but to the sequencing and timing of implementation. Judgments about sequencing and timing are going to be affected by a number of factors, including availability of required resources, existence of supporting organizational structures, and degree of political risks involved, that determine which recommendations are going to be deemed as feasible and which are the least costly. There are clear benefits from starting with reforms that are easiest to implement—those for which institutional support and resources already exist and which involve little political risk—not necessarily with those that are of foremost importance. The benefits from starting easy in an education system that has not had a strong record of success cannot be overstated. Quick successes are confidence-building both for the implementers and the beneficiaries, and can pave the way for more risk-taking.

Among the reforms that are easiest to implement, there are potential gains from acting on those that are likely to yield multiplier effects, that is, those that facilitate or reduce the cost of implementing other reforms as well as increase the gains from achieving those related reforms. For example, successful textbook reform—rationalizing the choice of textbooks and getting textbooks in the hands of students—complements reforms related to the curriculum or teacher development. In fact, strategic implementation recognizes the linkages between the reforms and uses breakthroughs in one area to create breakthroughs in other areas. A critical shortcoming of the implementation of many reforms is the failure to take advantage of these types of synergies.

Broad Support for Specific Recommendations

Reforms are more feasible and sustainable if there is political consensus on and broad support for, the recommended changes—among the key implementers of the reforms, the wider education community, as well as within the national population. This was not the case with the education policy recommendations. First, some recommendations were contested by national education stakeholders even at the time of the deliberations. For example, at the time of the PESS discussions, informants reported that CHED did not agree with the recommendation for its commissioners to give up their position as chairs of the governing boards of SUCs. The commissioners argued that those positions are about the only mechanism for the agency to influence and supervise SUCs. An additional obstacle was the need for a corresponding legislative action to amend the Higher Education Modernization Act of 1997, which provides for the composition and powers of the governing boards.

Second, while the preparation of the policy papers involved representatives of key national stakeholders, the policy efforts of PESS and PCER did not attempt to build a broad political constituency around the conclusions of the reports. The absence of political support from an organized and sustained network of interests for the education reforms made the recommendations vulnerable to the subsequent changes in the political leadership within the three key education agencies. Changes in political administration eroded the commitment to specific recommendations and led to changes in policy or priority, implementation focus, and funding allocations, thereby interrupting the continuity of policies and programs. For example, some of the recommendations required legal changes, such as an amendment of the Higher Education Modernization Act of 1997 that determines the composition and powers of the governing boards of SUCs. The absence of broad political consensus reduced the probability of passing such legislation, especially with respect to the more contested recommendations (e.g., enforcing the moratorium on the creation and conversion of new SUCs, introduction of incentives for teachers based on performance).

An Institutional Environment for Change

In addition to factors that are specific to individual recommendations, the absence of an enabling environment for change in the education system deserves blame. The policy papers did recognize the need for institutional changes in the system, such as the enhancement of local school boards of primary schools, improvement of teacher management, and a strengthening of the accreditation system for private institutions, but there are even more basic institutional reforms that are necessary for the specific recommended reforms to be implemented.

• The education sector needs a champion for reform whose accountability is the performance of the whole education sector and whose institutional interest is the efficient, coordinated functioning of the whole system. The current lack of an integrated leadership in the education sector cripples the ability of the policymakers to act strategically across the sub-sectors. The recommended National Coordinating Council for Education would provide needed coordination of actions and monitoring of the progress of implementation in the different education sub-sectors, but the leadership role that the whole sector needs goes beyond one of coordination.

• When there are loose connections between the points of actions for education reform and the chief beneficiaries of those reforms, there are, at best, weak consequences for the quality of performance and thus weak incentives to assume the costs of reform. Transferring some decision making and implementation authority closer to those who are likely to benefit most ensures that a more sustained push for reforms exists. Moreover, local accountability mechanisms (such as the community’s ability to change the composition of the local school board, to affect the level of resources available to the school, or to unseat a local education manager for poor performance) ensure that there would be real consequences to improvements in performance and thus create the incentives for local leaders to experiment with better ways of doing things. Indeed, there are difficult and sufficiently different local conditions in the Philippines to make experimentation rewarding and even necessary, and to the extent that a region can learn from the experience of others, locally generated innovations can underpin continuing improvements in education. The Philippine education sector, which continues to be centralized relative to other sectors, can benefit from more devolved decision making.

• Yet decentralization cannot establish all the necessary incentives for reform. Sometimes it makes sense to retain decision making authority at a more aggregate level of governance and management because of economies of scale, such as in the case of teacher deployment, policies towards SUCs, and the design of assessment systems. The question then is, Can the government establish and enforce accountability mechanisms for when there are likely to be loose connections between the implementers for change and the beneficiaries of that change? Some answers emerge from the experience of other countries. First, required are clear, widely known performance standards and measures, an information system that provides timely, periodic and accurate comparative data on performance, and an information-based system management. It makes sense for the government to maintain a national education information network that supports planning and budgeting tasks at all levels of government, to ensure performance measurement and reporting, and to monitor innovations and provide the informational basis for replication across local governments. The current management of the education system, though equipped with a management information system, does not use information efficiently throughout the system. There is need also to audit existing skills of personnel regularly and to map missing skills. While districts should be responsible for upgrading local skills to the necessary level, the national government should be responsible for the maintenance of performance standards that are the basis for the skills audit.

• Second, a strong incentive for reform must exist in the education communities. A binding or operative legal and regulatory framework could compel agencies at different levels of government to act. For example, despite the obvious need to improve the allocation of public resources for education, there is no legal support for modifying how teachers are deployed throughout the country. The Magna Carta, the law that regulates the teaching profession, continues to prevent the government from transferring teachers to areas where they are more needed. Reforms cannot all be mandated by legal action; however, this approach is too costly in terms of initiating and enforcing reform. On the other hand, competition for prestige and resources that is based on agreed-upon performance standards can be a powerful and less costly incentive mechanism.

• The country’s education system has responded in some cases to emerging gaps and growing needs within the context of limited resources through innovations in terms of delivery modes, systems improvement, and alternative approaches. A number of new solutions or novel policy or program interventions have been designed and implemented through experimentation and demonstration, some of which registered successes in terms of targeted education outcomes, but in a limited setting. In many cases, however, education policymakers and key implementers continued to pursue reforms, without regard to the successes achieved through these earlier innovations. A number of new interventions to address cyclical problems of resource inequity or quality issues were designed without building on the worthy innovations on the ground. Case studies documenting innovations developed in other countries which are applicable in the local setting need to be taken into account as interventions are designed. The complexity of the reform process in the education sector necessitates building on these successful and feasible innovations and ensuring their replication particularly in areas at-risk or most in need.

Political Will for Change

The key feature characterizing the above environment for change is a prevailing illusion that education reforms in the Philippines seem discretionary, a “nice to have” initiative that can be pursued voluntarily when conditions and timing are right. There does not seem to be a widely shared sense that education reforms are a vital necessity, a matter of survival for the education system, an imperative imposed upon the nation due to decades of inaction or inadequate effort.

There are some opinion survey data that indicate that national political leaders are less rewarded by favorable opinion when they succeed in education reform while they are severely punished by unfavorable opinion when such reforms fail. Such an opinion climate makes for severely risk-averse education policymaking. There are also some observers that point out that most of the children of influential policymakers in politics, media and academe now attend private schools. This suggests that the parents who make decisions affecting the large public school system do so without benefit from lessons from their children’s schooling experience, or worse on the basis of their own outdated impressions of public schools twenty to forty years ago. The urgency for change may also be temper by the fact that past achievements in education seem to be enough to continue yielding sufficient human resources for overseas and domestic employment. These explanations may place the lack of more vigorous education reform in context, although none of these will save or exempt the country from the worst consequences and missed opportunities of not addressing large-scale and long-standing education disadvantages and inefficiencies.

A vigorous and sustained political impetus for change in the education sector needs to follow through with the structural reforms of EDCOM, the technical recommendations of PESS and PCER, and the potential promise of the gains in the past five years. For example, the Restructured Basic Education Curriculum is mainly an intended curriculum at this time, and its most important objectives will be attained only if the necessary material, organizational and technical support to its delivery were provided. When the previous elementary education curriculum (the Revised New Elementary School Curriculum) was mandated in the 1980’s, it was accompanied with a major infusion of resources (including a major World Bank project, PRODED) to provide support for teacher training, procure new textbooks, improve instructional supervision, and introduce student assessment tools and capacities. A similar concerted effort might be necessary to ensure that the BEC delivers on its intended improvements.

Such a concerted effort will need political leadership at the highest levels as well as supportive technical and managerial leadership at professional levels. A leadership network of this scale is not likely to emerge fully grown from anywhere in the present system. While many elements and capacities for a leadership network for education reform exists, a process for catalyzing involvement, collaboration and sustained action will need to reach out to the isolated pockets of excellence and efficiency and connect them to a politically viable movement for change.

Such a catalyzing process can consist of a rigorously monitored program of innovations and experiments for identifying small successes which is then coupled with an organized strategic effort aimed at building on these small successes as key levers for change. This process can generate benefits that attract constituencies and champions, as well as valuable learning, that will be critical to success in ever larger arena of reform. This process can enable a leadership network to summon the political will to emerge, grow and lead the change in the education sector.

References

__________. 1999. Philippine Education for the 21st Century (The 1988 Philippines Education Sector Study). A joint study of the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank undertaken in collaboration with the Department of Education, Culture and Sports, the Commission on Higher Education, the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority, the Department of Science and Technology and the National Economic and Development Authority of the Government of the Philippines. Manila: Asian Development Bank.

Adversario, Patricia. 2003. Manila Times, April 22.

Department of Education. 2002. Basic Fact Sheet. Manila.

. 2003. “Banking on education to propel a new spurt of growth,” Bangkok: December 11, 2003.

Government of the Philippines. 2003. Philippine Socio-economic Report 2002. Manila.

Imperial, Napoleon. 2002. Resource Allocation for the Education Sector: Policy and Institutional Options. Manila.

Manasan, Rosario. 2001. The President’s Budget for 2001: Setting Priorities Amid Depleted Choices. PIDS. Manila.

National Center for Education Statistics. 2003. “TIMSS Results.” Institute of Education Statistics, US Department of Statistics.

Presidential Commission on Educational Reform. 2000. Philippine Agenda for Educational Reform: The PCER Report. Manila.

Quintero, Martha Yolanda. 2003. Ímplementation of the Recommendations of the 1998 Philippines Education Sector Study. Background Note prepared for the Education Assistance Strategy Paper. Manila.

Tan, Edita. 2002. Studies on the Access of the Poor to Higher Education. Report prepared for the Asian Development Bank.

United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). 2003. “UNFPA in the Philippines.” .ph/unfpa_in_the_phils.htm.

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Table 1. Student performance on mathematics and science tests: Ranking among 38 countries

|Country |Mathematics score & |Science score & |

| |rank |rank |

|Singapore |604 (1) |568 (2) |

|Korea |587 (2) |549 (5) |

|Taiwan |585 (3) |569 (1) |

|Hong Kong |582 (4) |530 (15) |

|Japan |579 (5) |550 (4) |

|Malaysia |519 (16) |492 (22) |

|Thailand |467 (27) |482 (24) |

|Indonesia |403 (34) |435 (32) |

|Philippines |348 (36) |345 (36) |

Source: Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study 1999

Figure 1. Gross and net enrollment rates in East Asian countries, 2000

[pic][pic]

Notes: GNP per capita data (in parenthesis) are for 2002. Data on Thailand’s net enrollment rate at the secondary level is not available.

Data sources: UNESCO, 2003; World Bank 2003.

Source: Department of Education

Figure 2. Trends in NEAT and NSAT scores

[pic]

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Notes: GER=Gross enrollment rate; Secondary Completion Rate=Completion rate at Grade 10, conditional on having started high school.

Source: Department of Education

Notes: GER – Gross Enrollment Rate

Source: Department of Education

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