Education reform on all sides

In keeping with the spirit of the season, let me say that education reform advocates have much to be grateful for this year. For the first time in quite a long while, we can see where we’re going and we have a fairly clear idea on how to get there.

For instance, the passage of the Enhanced Basic Education Act of 2013 (Republic Act No. 10533) could prove to be the tipping point we have been waiting for to propel our education system into meeting, or even exceeding, international competency standards, and into one that is truly responsive to both national development goals and individual aspirations.

RA 10533 has paved the way for education experts and stakeholders to come together to craft a no-nonsense 12-year basic education curriculum that features Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTBME) in the early grades and career specialization tracks in senior high school.

We have also noticed a welcome shift in the way our communities see the schools that serve them. Less than a decade ago, the phrase “bureaucratic isolation from the community” was used to describe one of the root causes of the Philippine education crisis. Today, education’s character as a public value is apparent in every school community that I’ve visited. It is now commonplace for communities to initiate and sustain local-level education improvement projects and programs. The ever-improving yearly figures on the number and scope of community participation in the Department of Education’s Brigada

Eskwela during the National Schools Maintenance Week will certainly bear this out.

Equally encouraging is the fact that public attention has been increasingly focused on two equally critical factors to education quality: One is the mastery, by Grade 3, of the reading competency; the other is the advocacy to improve the quality of instruction across the entire education spectrum, from basic education to technical vocational, to higher education and even to alternative learning systems.

The Eggie Apostol Foundation finds these developments truly inspiring, because these are precisely the reform agenda that we first articulated through the Education Revolution that Tita Eggie and EAF president Maria Lim Ayuyao launched in 2002.

Also this year, I’ve personally had the unique opportunity to work on an aspect of education reform that I rarely had the chance to realize in the past. Through Penny Bongato, executive director for talent development at the Information Technology and Business Process Association of the Philippines (Ibpap), I have learned that far too many of our graduates—high school or college—who are legally old enough to work do not possess competencies that are deemed desirable in the 21st-century world of work.

Ibpap is the enabling trade organization for the information technology and business process management (IT BPM) industry, a high-growth and high-productivity sector that hires literally thousands of young men and women coming from various academic disciplines—from finance and

accounting, engineering, medicine, fine arts, even applied physics and, would you believe, law?

According to both Bongato and Ibpap president Jomari Mercado, in 2012 the IT BPM industry generated close to $14 billion in revenue and contributed to anywhere from 4 to 5 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. Ibpap’s immediate past president Benedict C. Hernandez added that in 2012, the IT BPM industry hired 772,000 full-time employees from our pool of graduates. By 2016, Hernandez expects the

demand to grow to around 1.3 million.

And yet, thus far the industry’s average hire rate is only around five to eight out of 100 applicants. Bongato says that the rest of the applicants fall by the wayside because they do not have the most important competency of all: the ability to communicate well in a language of wider usage like English.

But the good news is that even higher education is actively undergoing its own reform process. The Commission on Higher Education (CHEd), which is headed by Chair Patricia B. Licuanan, has articulated its own Higher Education Reform Agenda, that seeks to address higher education’s “fundamental weaknesses” through a two-fold thrust that “expands and enhances students’ career and life chances and choices” and places higher education and its institutions “in the full service of national development.”

The Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (Tesda)—the third element in our “trifocalized” education system—has not been resting on its laurels either. I recently had the chance to meet Marta M. Hernandez, its technical vocational education training executive director, who revealed that under the leadership of Secretary Joel Villanueva, Tesda is constantly revisiting its mandate for the “comprehensive development of the Filipino workforce.”

Don’t you think that it’s a good sign that the DepEd, CHEd and Tesda are doing all that they can to create an education system that, in Eggie Apostol’s words, forms our youth into “citizens with purpose and vision”?

From the other end, I think that it’s great that the private sector has heightened its involvement in education reform. We all should: A lot of pressure will be brought to bear on the level of competency of both our graduates and our workforce when something called Asean 2015 comes to life.

In the meantime, Merry Christmas and God bless us all!

Butch Hernandez (butchhernandez@gmail.com) is the executive director of the Eggie Apostol Foundation and education lead for talent development at Ibpap.