They spend almost the same amount but Vietnam outranks PH in Pisa

Department of Education (DepEd) deputy spokesperson Francis Bringas said the country may have to quintuple its current $11,030 per student spending before it could expect to perform at the level of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries in the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa).

Bringas had acknowledged that with the state of our economy, we cannot expect to be able to keep up with the developed countries in funding for education thus it was strange he recommended the unrealistic quintupling of our current budget per student especially as we have a fellow Southeast Asian country in the same income category which is succeeding in international student assessments on a shoestring. It is impossible that DepEd is unaware that in the 2022 Pisa, Vietnam missed the OECD averages in mathematics, science, and reading by mere 3, 13, and 14 points, respectively, all on a per-student spending of $13,800 or just $2,770 or 25.11 percent more than the Philippines. In the 2012 and 2013 Pisa rounds, Vietnam topped all developing countries and outranked many rich countries. In those two rounds, Vietnam surpassed all the OECD average scores except in reading in 2015.

It is easy to see how in the 2022 Pisa, Vietnam had placed No. 31 to the Philippines’ No. 75 (based on mathematics, the main domain for the round). Here are a couple of the most glaring differences in the education systems of the two countries:

In Vietnam, there is an entrance examination for senior high school and senior high school graduation examination/university entrance test which students must pass to pursue higher education. In the Philippines, there are no similar hurdles as the National Achievement Test has no bearing on the graduation of our students.

Vietnam makes sure its schoolchildren learn to read in Grade 1 while the Philippines is not particular about when learners learn the basic skill.

There are no materials online which explicitly say that all Grade 1 pupils in Vietnam learn to read before the school year ends but the following data strongly indicate that such is the practice in that country:

Finding of the Young Lives project of Oxford University that in basic literacy and numeracy tests given to a sample of 1,000 eight-year-old children from five Vietnamese provinces, “88 percent could read a basic sentence, 75 percent could write a basic sentence without errors or difficulties and 86 percent could successfully answer a simple numeracy test.”

Learning poverty as of 2019 was 2 percent.

The DepEd should also know that the case of the Dominican Republic (DR) indicates that even if our education funding is increased, if the agency’s ineffectiveness in teaching reading is not fixed, the country will remain stuck in the bottom of the rankings. The DR is spending $46,500 per student which is more than four times the funding of the Philippines but it is one of the six countries the latter outdid in the 2022 Pisa. How come? Just like Filipino students, DR students are incompetent readers. They were No. 74 in reading. Our students were No. 76.

Estanislao C. Albano, Jr.,[email protected]