Sen. Chiz Escudero this week pushes for a fixed term for the secretary of education to insulate the department from politics and maintain continuity in its programs.
“We must ensure that the education of our youth is not tied to the fortunes of the appointing power or the politics of the day,” he said.
“We can insulate the Department of Education given the president’s power to reorganize government by simply providing that its secretary be not co-terminus with the appointing power. We can ensure a fixed term in law for him,” Escudero said.
The 39-year old senator also favors the decen-tralization of the DepEd so appropriate policies are crafted and problems immediately acted on at the regional level.
He said the next president should also form a commission to develop a master plan that will set benchmarks and timetables to bring the country’s level of education at par with the best in the region.
“The Commission can map out a painless transition from the current 10-year basic education cycle to 12 years,” Escudero suggested.
In his talk at an education forum, he also reiterated his proposal for government to increase the education budget from 12 percent to the Southeast Asian standard of 20 percent.
He said the government is only spending US$138.00 per student compared to Thailand’s US$853.00 and Singapore’s US$1800.00.
“The constitution’s mandate for government to give education the highest budgetary priority has not been followed since its ratification in 1987", he pointed out.
“The highest budgetary priority is being given to debt service. They were able to circumvent the constitution by considering debt service as an off-budget item,” he said. Debt service is currently at about P600 billion while the budget for education is about P160 billion. (The Philippines foreign debt is now 4.1 trillion dollars.)
Hits CHED Over ‘Diploma Mills’
Senator Chiz Escudero last month said the proliferation of “diploma mills” shows the failure of the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) to monitor and regulate the quality of education in our colleges and universities.
“Our student and ultimately their parents, should be protected from schools offering substandard educational programs. CHED has the power to regulate these programs and has the authority to shut them down. Sadly, it has not done so,” he said.
“Unaware of the appalling performance in licensure examinations, parents spend hard-earned money in schools that profit from their dreams of a better life for their children,” Escudero said.
Data from the Professional Regulatory Commission show that the average national passing rate for courses with licensure examinations has never reached the 50 percent mark from 1994 to 2004.
According to Escudero, CHED wields power ranging from the authority to issue sanctions from “initial warning for program termination” to the issuance of a “recommendation for program termination” on schools found to have substandard performance.
“However, CHED has not done so. The least it could do is to make public the performance of schools in various licensure examinations,” he said.
“If the government can spend for expensive TV infomercials, I see no reason they cannot allot some funds to a more meaningful information campaign that would help our parents make informed choices on which school to choose for their children,” Escudero said.
The senator pointed to the poor performance of many nursing schools in the country.
The Commission on Audit (COA) had already criticized CHED for failure to shut down non-performing nursing schools whose graduates fail miserably in PRC board examinations, he pointed out.
According to COA auditors, there were 19 schools that did not even produce a board passer in the recent past.
“The COA went on to say that from 2001 to 2005, only 111 out of 263 nursing schools nationwide managed to have 50 percent of their graduates pass the licensure examination. No school offering the nursing program with poor PRC performance has ever been shut down,” Escudero added.
He noted that nursing and Hotel and Restaurant Management continue to be the top two college degree courses this year, with 422,978 and 123,523 enrolled students, respectively, out of a total of over 2.6 million college students in school year 2008-2009. /MP
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