Final Assignment for Comparative Political Economy

Submitted by: Earl Harry Bea

7 Indicators and motivations

Education in the Philippines is a basic and a constitutional right. The constitution explicitly states that
each and every citizen are entitled to affordable and quality education. Education’s goals are to provide
Filipinos the fundamental skills and knowledge that they need to sustain themselves, develop their
character and values, and contribute to the society and the economy. For these reasons, it is clear that
the education sector has a significant contribution to both economic growth and social equity. Thus, the
state has a vital role to play in achieving these ends so that the country can grow, be on par with
international standards, and keep up with the growing global economy. One of the recent difficulties in
developing our education system is providing adequate and quality ICT learning to raise the digital
literacy of Filipinos. The world is on its fourth industrial revolution, and it is high time for developing
countries such as ours to keep up the pace. For this assignment, I intend to assess the government’s
performance, pre-Covid, in promoting basic quality education to its constituents, and the recent
developments in improving digital literacy by comparing them to global figures and standards. With
that, I have determined 7 indicators that capture the challenges but also some improvements in the
education sector:

1) Government Expenditure on Education (%GDP) is an important indicator because it determines

how much does the state prioritizes education by identifying how much percentage it takes up
on the government’s national expenditure. Most countries invest in basic education so that
citizens would be provided with the means to build effective and efficient human capital.
According to our constitution, the state should assign the highest budgetary priority to
education. While that remains to be true, the Philippines remains to have one of the lowest
budget allocations to education among its ASEAN and Western neighbors. Adding to that issue,
there has been a huge underspending in the education sector over these years. Looking at
numerical data, the government spends only 2-3% of their budget for education. Although the
state has not been consistent to provide data, the general trend seems to be going upwards.
However, when comparing it to world averages, we still fall behind by at least 1-2%.

The reason for the Philippines’ huge budget for education is to ensure that the sector would
always have enough allocation, despite the many priorities of congress, to improve the access
and quality of education in all regions and levels, and at the same time, to continue attracting
fresh graduates to work as teachers. 7 years ago, the education sector underwent a huge
education reform by implementing the K-12 program. As part of the government’s commitment
to support this program, DepEd’s 10-point agenda, and the Philippine Development Plan, they
have steadily increased their public budget. This increase in the budget does not mean an
increased share of spending as observed with the persistent problems of this sector. The
government’s underspending is reflected on how the national government, the local
government unit, and DepEd utilized their budget.

At the beginning of 2013, a year after the implementation of K-12, the government’s priorities
shifted and mostly focused their efforts on infrastructure development especially on roads,
communications, and transportation. Furthermore, the local government units’ expenditure
comprises a small and decreasing share on the total basic education spending. The DepEd, on
 the other hand, while having an increasing yearly budget, its budget execution rate (the rate at
which the budget is appropriately utilized) declined over the years.

The underspending in the sector has only been resolved by the end of 2017 but most of its
budget were utilized on streamlining their financials rather than allocating them towards other
glaring problems of the sector. For example, quality education remains a privilege and it is often
only accessible by most of the middle and wealthy classes. The country also suffers from a
shortage of school buildings, instructional materials, and equipment to better facilitate classes.
The teachers are also undermanned, underpaid, and often work on overtimes. With these low
levels of spending on education and the underutilization of the budget, the state struggles to
reach their mandate of providing quality and affordable education for all. These problems which
will be expounded on the succeeding indicators.

2) The net percent enrollment rate is an indicator which presents the number of students,
regardless of their age, that enter primary education. While the state struggles to improve the
quality of education in the Philippines, the Enrollment Rate in Primary Education (% Net) has
significantly increased over the years. World averages pales in comparison when placed side by
side with local data. Besides the fact that primary education is mandatory, the spike of
motivation and interest, especially by the poor, to enroll their children in school because
programs like the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program and the Conditional Cash Transfer exist.
These government programs strengthened incentives to send and keep their children in school.
Furthermore, other programs implemented by DepEd, such as the alternative learning system
program and schools for special needs, contributed to the increase of the enrollment rate.

As much as this is a positive output, concerns to accessibility of schooling remains to be a

problem. Although, the numbers are not presented in this paper, there are still a lot of children
that are out of school or have recently dropped out due to financial and personal reasons.
Government financial assistance programs like the ones mentioned above are helpful but has
recently become problematic and inefficient, with some claims that they are not receiving the
aid that was promised to them. Most of the school structures also remain to be dense in urban
areas while rural areas suffer from having insufficient classrooms, facilities, and equipment.
With the sudden increase of students in the country, the DepEd has a lot on their plate to
ensure that students will even have a school to go to after their enrollment.

3) Another problem that is reflected by the increase of enrollees in the primary education is the
Pupil-to-Teacher Ratio. While there have not been any found results of problematic
consequences between the correlation of class sizes and learning outputs, a lot of experts seem
to agree that it is still a factor that affects the quality of learning, and that they recommend
maintaining a low number of students to teacher ratios as students would feel more engaged in
small group discussions, and teachers are able to evaluate and guide them better. Looking at
world averages, they were able to cut down the class sizes to 23 students. Although, there are
reports that say class sizes are better in rural areas in the Philippines, on average, the country
remains to have at least 30 students per class. Looking at urban areas, class sizes in public
schools have the largest number with having mostly 50-60 students. Although they are not the
main focus of the paper, private schools tend to have large class sizes as well. Besides
overcrowding as a persisting problem, the lack of highly skilled teachers to accommodate
students is also one of the problems that the sector face. Not enough graduates or skilled
professionals choose teaching as a career, and it might be due to the fact that teacher benefits
 are poor in the country. Thus, a lot of schools have to employ sub-par teachers that might
produce poor learning outcomes for the students. With teachers being badly needed in
overcrowded schools, there also comes the risk that rural areas might be left behind with even a
scarcer distribution of teachers.

4) Despite concerns on quality of student learning, and on teacher supply and skills, the Philippines
has a large Primary Education Completion Rate (% Relevant Age Group) over world averages.
This indicator may be something we can be celebrating about, but there are still concerns that
needs to be addressed. While some other countries may have stricter mobility in moving up to
the secondary level, the Philippines has a policy called No Filipino Child Left Behind. It is a policy
that ensures that students will have their grades curved if they are failing so that they may still
at least pass their subjects and move on to the next level. In my opinion, as much as it helps
everyone to advance in the mandatory K-12 system, the tradeoff here is that students might
receive subpar learning and would have a more difficult time in learning advance concepts if
they were already performing poorly on earlier subjects. With the quality of education that
students seem to be receiving, we might be facing an adult population in the future that has
accomplished their schooling but would have poor knowledge and skills.

5) Finally, the measure of the Functional Literacy Rate, that determines the youth’s capacity to
read, write, and do arithmetic, is an important factor on whether primary schools have actually
fulfilled their mandate for providing basic education. Looking at the data, despite having gaps on
Philippine numbers, the country is doing better, even if the trend in world averages is also
positive, with most of its youth at least having the basic skills and knowledge so that they can
get by in their lives. The problem with this indicator is that it does not represent how these
functional literacy skills are effectively applied in practical situations. It only measures the
capacity of an individual to do most of these skills. Since the indicator measures the population
of youth from ages 13-30, I looked for a complementary local indicator to showcase the primary
education’s reality—Elementary National Achievement Test (NAT) scores that determines the
breadth of learning outcomes of students. While the results in this indicator is an overall
positive output, NAT scores have seemed to decline over the years, with Critical Thinking gaining
the poorest average followed by Mathematics. The poor Critical Thinking scores in comparison
to the youth’s Functional Literacy Rates seem to indicate that while students are learning, they
actually do not grasp effectively on how they can utilize their learnings in their lives, which can
grow to be a problem if not addressed.

6) Having criticized the previous indicators that measure the quality of education, the next two
indicators explain a problem that will severely affect the education sector if no appropriate
measures are enacted. Since its improvement on budget utilization only from the recent years,
while its spending remains pale in comparison to the other debt-financed priorities of the state,
the government seems to focus most of its resources in making sure that the current system
that we have will be improved. However, if we are not quick enough to adapt to the digital age,
the great (but questionable) results above might plummet in the succeeding years.

The first indicator, Individuals Using Internet (% Population), measures the percentage of
internet users around the world. Despite the unusual drop in 2015, the Philippine data implies
how vital the internet has been to us. It is integrated much in our society already, and that more
and more people in the country have been using it to boost their processes in various sectors.
With industries already expanding towards digital means, there is a high demand in the
 education sector to develop their Information Communication Technologies. Global standards,
as expressed by the Sustainable Development Goals as well, hope that young learners should
also be equipped with the necessary digital literacy skills so that countries may produce
graduates in the future with skillsets desirable by the modern workforce.

Another thing to note here is that while the majority of the country has been using internet in
their daily lives, this does not necessarily mean that the Philippines has the full understanding
and learning to utilize the internet to its greatest extent. While I wish we already have a global
and local data to determine digital literacy rates, these last two indicators present a situation
that needs to be addressed.

7) With the previous indicator providing a description of the emerging importance of internet
usage, Secure Internet Servers (per 1M pax) as an indicator determines the accessibility and
affordability of the internet per individual. Internet access is key since ICT development are
regarded as essential tools of development, contributing to global integration and enhancing
public sector effectiveness, efficiency, and transparency. If we were to significantly progress,
students must be well-versed with digital skills and have access to modern gadgets and the
internet. However, looking at our data in comparison with the world, we are very left behind.
While it seems to be on a positive trend, the world has already surpassed us by a lot. To put this
into context even more, on average, the Philippine telecommunications priced our internet at
$56.24/100mbps while the cheapest internet price in the world is at $6.19/100mbps. Our
average speeds are also subpar with the majority of the public having only access to 25mbps.

This presents a situation that access to digital means is going to be a big problem to us. The gap
between the Philippines and the world is large and there is a need for a lot of work to close this
gap. That starts to happen when we have affordable and accessible means for learning. If digital
learning will be the next phase of modern education, teachers would need to be reeducated for
new skills, students who have benefitted from government programs might not be able to
continue their education if gadgets become a must in schools. Therefore, spending for education
to provide for families without the means for gadgets will also become a problem. On top of the
glaring quality of education already present, the threat of the digital divide will make things
much more difficult for the education sector if our government will not act on streamlining our
telecommunications and providing adequate access for digital learning.

These are all assumptions based on current observations and should not be treated as definitive
problems of the sector going forward into the digital age. As we do not have yet the adequate
data to fully determine that students lack the necessary digital skills today, further analysis and
data gathering must be conducted. However, the last two indicators do present a situation
which will become problematic for both telecommunications and education (and other
industries) in the future if we do not close the gap for the digital divide.