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BY NEIL HONEYMAN
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ALS
ONE OF THE tragedies of our education system is that few students are able to meet their education potential. There are many reasons for this. Poverty, of course, is a major factor. A related issue is the difficulty of the journey from home to school, particularly in remote areas.
Infrastructure projects include an emphasis on farm to market roads. This needs to be expanded to have better home to school transportation.
One of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals to which the Philippines is a signatory is that by 2015 all students would complete grade school education. Sadly, we have failed to achieve this goal. But we are making progress, although there is still a long way to go.
There is now a willingness to invest heavily in education. The budget for the Department of Education (DepEd) was P433.4 billion in 2016. This has increased by a whopping 31 percent this year to P567.6 million.
More schools are being built, particularly in rural areas. This will have the effect of shortening the journey to school, thereby hopefully ensuring that more students stay in school for longer.
But what of students who drop out? Many regret not fulfilling their potential. Will they be able to have a second chance?
When Dr. Leonor Briones became DepEd Secretary on July 1, 2016 she said that one of her objectives was to improve the Alternative Learning System (ALS). The idea is to give out-of-school youth learning opportunities outside the formaleducation system.
Progress, however, is slow. Clear objectives need to be set. One necessary goal is to have equivalency options in the ALS environment which are genuinely compatible with those of formal education.
We are losing our way, however. The formal education sector is no longer measuring progress of our students. The national examinations are being avoided. We no longer know how well, or badly, we are doing compared with previous years and with other nations. For some years now we have not been part of the United Nations Education Cultural and Scientific Organization (UNESCO) which compares performance in most countries for 15 year old students in Math, English, Science. We should rejoin this program so that we can see how globally competitive we are.
Or are not./PN
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