SPECIAL REPORT: Maids Work to Teach, Teachers Work as Maids

By Carl Marc Ramota
Posted in Bulatlat

Maids Work to Teach, Teachers Work as Maids
(First of three parts)

Teachers who are supposed to supply the brain – so to speak – for the country’s youth are themselves part of the brain drain. The country produces enough of these professionals to arrest the worsening teaching shortage but more and more of them go abroad – or stay in the country – to work as housemaids.

Future Looks Dim for Education Graduate
(Second of three parts)

It will be take 3 in the licensure exams for education graduate Jymsie Amor Racoma in August. To Jymsie, who worked as a maid to earn her college degree and ended up in her old job after graduation, the future looks dim.

Education: A Low State Priority
(Last of 3 parts)

Education is an avowed priority of the state but under the present administration – like its predecessors – it does not draw an ounce of sympathy from the authorities.

More Pre-need Firms to Close Due to Unabated Tuition Hikes

“Pacific Plans and CAP’s downfall merely highlight how the cost of education, particularly in the tertiary level, has dramatically increased after the deregulation of tuition.”

More Pre-need Firms to Close Due to Unabated Tuition Hikes
Upsurge in dropout rate seen in coming school year


Anak ng Bayan Youth Party predicted that more pre-need firms are doomed to close this coming school year unless the government starts to address the incessant tuition hikes in tertiary schools.

Carl Marc Ramota, Anak ng Bayan spokesperson said, “Unless the government starts to flex its muscles over the continuing tuition and miscellaneous fee hikes, we will be seeing more pre-need education firms closing in the next months. Evidently, even pre-need firms were not able to foresee and absorb the impact of unabated tuition increases in the last two decades.”

Recently, another pre-need firm declared bankcrupty a few months after industry giant College Assurance Plan (CAP) crumbled. Pacific Plans said it can no longer pay for the tuition of its planholders this coming school year.

“This was also the reason behind the unexpected collapse of CAP,” Ramota said. “Pacific Plans and CAP’s downfall merely highlight how the cost of education, particularly in the tertiary level, has dramatically increased after the deregulation of tuition.”

Deregulation of Tuition
From 1990 to 1995 just before the Asian financial bubble burst in 1997, tuition jumped to 275 percent. For the last 15 years since 1990, tuition has swelled by a whopping 670 percent.

Anak ng Bayan projects that if the average tuition rate increase of 12 percent continues for the next five years, the national average per unit would reach P590.20 by 2010. By then tuition would have increased by as high as 1,257.41 percent since 1990.

In the current schoolyear, 381 out of 1,321 private higher education institutions - or 29 percent of the total – have applied for tuition increase. The national average tuition increase is 11.37 percent or P33.15; the current rate per unit is P334.89.

In the National Capital Region, the average tuition is pegged at P614.54 posting a 10.83 percent increase compared to last year’s figures.

A study made by Anak ng Bayan Youth Party on the rising cost of tertiary education showed that in just five years, from academic year 2000-2001 to the present, the national average tuition rate has increased by as much as 63 percent. The National Capital Region (NCR) average rate, on the other hand, went up by 57 percent.

Based on the Commission on Higher Education’s (CHED) records on tuition increases, tuition was steadily increasing by an average of almost 12 percent for the last five years.

Ramota blamed the Education Act of 1982 for the continuous increase in the cost of tertiary education. “The deregulated environment set by the Act ensured the wholesale commodification of a fast-expanding private tertiary education,” he explained.

College Education Crisis in 2010
Ramota said the closure of pre-need firms sends a distressing signal to college hopefuls. “Parents and students apply for pre-need plans to ensure that they may be able to shoulder the high cost of tertiary education. With pre-need firms now closing, access to higher education has become impossible to many.”

“If pre-need firms can’t pay for their planholders’ tuition, what more for ordinary parents and students who do not even have one?”

Ramota also predicted an upsurge in the rate of college dropouts and number of out-of-school youth in the coming school year, a situation that will worsen in 2010.

“Five years from now, the Philippines’ tertiary education will likely face a crisis if the current trends in college enrolment and dropouts will continue,” he warned.

Who is next?

The wave of killings and other human rights violations perpetrated against journalists, government critics and activists sends a distressing signal to all Filipino youth.

The pile of unresolved cases and deliberate silence of supposed authorities erode whatever illusion or belief that democracy still works in this country.

It brings up today’s youth and the generations to come in a society enfolded with the culture of fear and impunity, where mercenaries and killers in uniforms wander freely; a society where dissension is answered by a bullet.

For so long, the youth remains a marginalized sector in the society despite its significant contributions in shaping the course of this nation. They say the youth must take part in nation building and governance.

But how does the Macapagal-Arroyo government take this sincere intention of the youth to participate actively in national governance? Instead of encouraging the youth to speak up, this government aims to silence us.

Three years back, campus journalist and human rights volunteer Benjaline “Beng” Hernandez was summarily executed by military and paramilitary elements in Arakan Valley, North Cotabato. Marjorie Reynoso, Anak ng Bayan Youth Party municipal coordinator and Sangguniang Kabataan chairperson in Maco, Compostela Valley with three other youth were butchered more than a year ago, also by alleged military elements.

At present, the Armed Forces of the Philippines and Malacañang are again dancing to the old tunes of anti-communist hysteria to discredit and frustrate progressive organizations and party list groups.

Who will be the next Beng or Marjorie? Who will be the next one to be robbed of a promising life ahead?

If this can be done even to elected SK officials, human rights workers and members of legal organizations, what more to ordinary young people, especially that until now, the perpetrators are still on the loose?

No Graduation, No Jobs for Poor Filipino Students

April is the time for the graduation of students in the elementary, high school and college levels. There is happiness in the faces of both parents and students when the latter receive their diplomas. Is this feeling shared by majority of Filipinos, or do most of the youth have are forced to do other things than study?

BY CARL MARC RAMOTA
Bulatlat

Public schools offer free tuition for elementary and high school students. This may account for high enrollment there, but the failure of most students to graduate could be explained by analyzing situation of the country’s educational system.

In school year 2003-2004, total high school enrolment was pegged at 6,270,208, of which 80 percent were in public high schools. And out of the 12,982,349 elementary students enrolled, almost 93 percent (12,061,675) studied in public schools.

While participation rates in elementary and high school may be increasing, data on the rates of completion, survival, dropout and retention are not showing substantial improvements. The dropout rate, in fact, is increasing.

End of the road
China de Vera, 16, is a senior student at Quirino High School in Quezon City and chair of the high school chapter of the League of Filipino Students (LFS). She will be graduating next month.

Instead of being excited about her graduation, de Vera feared that she and most of her batchmates may not be able to enter college. “Only a few are given (that) opportunity. For most us, high school graduation marks the end of our days in school.”

Her views reflect the signs of the times. Out of the six million students who were able to enter high school, only 2.4 million or 60 percent entered college in 2002-2004. While graduation rate among high school students was pegged at 90.62 percent in that year, cohort survival rate from 1st year to 4th year college was only 63.88 percent. Completion rate was even lower - only 58.62 percent.

Cohort survival is computed by determining the number of entrants and then knowing how many of them entered the last level of education. Completion rate, on the other hand, refers to the percentage of students who graduated from an educational level.

De Vera said that public high school students like her who decide to go to college have no other option but to enroll in state universities and colleges (SUCs) where tuition is relatively low compared to private schools. Unfortunately, only a few are admitted due to the SUCs’ high cut-off mark and limited slots.

The massive cuts in the SUC budget and rationalization policy of the Arroyo administration have already forced the closure or merger of several SUCs. From 271 in 1996, there were only 173 SUCs left by 2002.
“It is therefore not surprising why most high school students just stop schooling after graduation and start working. Unfortunately, there are also no available jobs so most of us end up unemployed, or engage in anti-social activities like drugs and prostitution,” she said.

Ironically, those enrolled in tertiary schools are also having a hard time finishing it. Data from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco)-National Commission in the Philippines showed that the cohort survival rate from first to fourth year college was only 22 percent. College dropout rate, on the other hand, was pegged at 73 percent.

Venancio Cabugos, 23, is an irregular political science major at Adamson University in Manila. He had to take on two part-time jobs to support his education. He earns a living through commissions received from selling tickets for a theater group and arranging educational tours for a travel agency. Previously, he worked as a waiter in a bar in Malate.

He admitted that he had to reduce his academic load and skip classes because of his part-time jobs. “Sometimes, I go directly to class from a field trip without sleep. I cannot afford to give up my jobs since I have to raise at least P13,000 ($238.66, based on an exchange rate of P54.47 per U.S. dollar) for my tuition alone every semester. Aside from that, there are a lot of things that you need to pay to live here in Manila,” he said in Filipino.

The same was true for Alpha Carole Pontalan, a sophomore student at the University of the Philippines’ College of Law who filed a leave of absence this semester and now works for a call center. She said she had to stop schooling for a while to support her family in Bicol and save for her future expenses in law school.

The drop-out race
A study by the National Youth Commission (NYC) in 1997 revealed that one in four barangays has no elementary schools, depriving some 1.6 million children of basic education. A third of the country’s barangays do not even have complete elementary schools, making primary education still inaccessible.

The average elementary cohort survival rate for the Philippines was 68.6 percent in 1997.

This means that out of a hundred who enter Grade I, only 68 of them normally finish Grade VI.

Survival rate in high school also showed a slight decline, from 74.7 percent in 1983-1984 to 73.3 percent in 1995-1996. This rate indicates that roughly a quarter of first year high school students do not reach the fourth year level.

The Functional Literacy and Exposure to Mass Media Survey (FLEMMS) conducted by the National Statistics Office (NSO) in 1994 provided the following reasons why these students did not go to school: lack of personal interest; housekeeping; and the high cost of education.

A similar survey made by the NSO on working children in 2001 stressed that the main reason given for dropping out of school was the loss of interest of the child in going to school, which accounted for 31 percent of total respondents. Others complained that they could not afford to go to school because of high cost of schooling (28 percent).

De Vera added that many students are discouraged to study also because of the condition of schools. “Who will be encouraged to study if there are more than 60 students cramped in a single classroom? You cannot blame them for not going to school if they don’t even have a chair and a textbook. Worse, most do not even have a classroom and there are some schools where only one teacher teaches grade one to three all at the same time.”

Data from the Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) showed that in the last school year, the country was short of 39,383 classrooms, 4,125,413 seats, 9.88 million textbooks and some 49,212 teachers.

Out of school
Many Filipino youth had to work at an early age to help augment the family income, sacrificing their education in the process. Worse, a lot of these working children have not even entered school.

Results of the 2002 Annual Poverty Indicators Survey (APIS) showed that the total number of out-of-school Filipino youth were 14.7 percent or 4.84 million out of 32.96 million population aged 6 to 24 years.

Mark Ferdinand Rosello, 17, is one of the many out-of school youth in the country. The youngest among four children, he wanted to take up Fine Arts to become a painter. However, he had to stop studying after his father died in 1999. He was only in his first year in high school.

He ended up doing silkscreen painting to earn a living. He was also among the street children along Quezon Avenue who sold newspapers or rags to motorists.

Rosello admitted that he is envious of batch mates who will be graduating this year. Like him, many Filipino children and youth had to stop studying and work to earn a living.

In 2001, the Philippine census showed that four million or 16.2 percent of children aged 5-17 years old were already economically active. This percentage was slightly higher than the 3.6 million economically active children reported in 1995. Of these children, about 40 percent were elementary undergraduate and another 32 percent had reached high school.

Thirty seven percent of these children did their job on a seasonal basis or only during school vacation. However, the same study also showed that a third of these children never attended school.

Majority of these children worked as laborers and unskilled workers (2.6 million or 65 percent). Others worked as service workers and shop and market sales workers (544,000 or 13.5 percent) and as farmers, forestry workers and fishermen (454,000 or 11.3 percent).

Indeed, the increasing number of dropouts and out-of-school youth negate government claims that education is accessible and affordable to majority of Filipinos. This trend is expected to continue unless reforms in the educational system are made that will create an atmosphere that is conducive for education. Bulatlat