Investing in education

EDITORIAL

The Aquino administration will be investing P238 billion in basic education for 2012, the largest budget ever allocated for such purpose.

Department of Budget and Management Sec. Florencio ‘Butch’ Abad affirmed this in a meeting with presidents of state universities and colleges from Cordillera and region I at Benguet State University in La Trinidad, Benguet last week.

According to Abad, who was once Education Secretary, the country’s education system is in crisis because it has long been neglected.

About half of the children are not in school and those who entered basic education – elementary and secondary, have poor achievement level and only less than 15 percent eventually get a college diploma while less than five percent finish a science and technology degree.

Such problem reflects also on tertiary education in the country, not only on SUCs “because the foundation is very weak and logically the tertiary education output, except in some or few universities/colleges if of inferior based from quality of graduates as we can see in the passing rate of our board exams.”

The reason, Abad added, why the government is investing heavily in basic education, including pre-school through the new ‘K to 12’ program. According to Abad, studies show that the children who were properly prepared to enter formal school have higher rates to finish up to secondary and even up to their tertiary level given ample support of government.

Another reason Abad pointed out is that we are now living at a very competitive world that the country needs to work hard to grow as an economy, and yet the education sector – our human resource development program, has not able to supply the current manpower that the growing industries need especially by the fast growing BPO sector.

Abad also announced that President Aquino gave them a directive to assure that before the end of 2014, the country should have been able to close the classroom gap in which the government is also bringing in the private sector to help build the needed classrooms.

“By next year, the target is for us to build 45,000 classrooms, which is far away from the average classroom of about six to 10,000 a year. The President also gave an instruction to hire the corresponding requirements, in terms of teachers, textbooks and other school facilities.”