TOM THOMPSON, A SPORTS COLUMNIST WRITING OUT of New Orleans, recently said that “Here in America, you could combine Lance Armstrong, Peyton Manning, LeBron James, Tom Cruise and 50 Cent into one person and you still wouldn’t have what the Philippines has in their number-one, all-time superstar Manny Pacquiao. He’s that important to his people.
As an American, I find myself somewhat envious of what the people of the Philippines have. We have nothing close to what they share with Manny Pacquiao.”
Indeed, the humble panadero from General Santos City literally fought his way through adversity to become our living national treasure. It is easy to misread a lot of things into Manny Pacquiao’s win over the Mexican legend Erik Morales. Astute politicians are naturally quick to take advantage of the media mileage that being close to Pacman brings. For most Filipinos, however, Pacquiao’s stunning victory over Erik the Great served to uplift their battered spirits—albeit quite briefly.
With the financial wealth that came with that triumph, he personified the marginalized Filipinos’ shared dream of a way out of the poverty trap, in true teleserye tradition.
Yet, in one of his post-fight interviews, Manny, in all candor, said that he would prefer his two young sons not to follow his footsteps. “Masyadong mahirap ang boksing (boxing is too difficult),” Pacman said. The statement brings us to the time-honored way to get ahead in life: quality education. At this point, Manny can afford to send his cute kids to the best schools here or abroad if he so desires, and he could very well do so.
His adoring multitude, meanwhile, will have to make do with sending their own children to public schools and hope for the best. Not a few of them might even prod their sons—or even daughters—to visit the local gym and spar a few rounds on their way home from school. Who knows?
Quite recently, in a commentary published by this paper, Education Undersecretary Miguel Luz credited the professional bureaucracy of the Department of Education for the agency’s continuing reform program—the absence of a political appointee as education secretary notwithstanding. Presumably, the program of reforms—which is quite comprehensive—will ultimately redound to a more consistent delivery of quality education to public school pupils and students.
Luz went on to say that “the Department of Education rank and file has said over the past six months that the system needs to be run by a professional educator” like Undersecretary Fe Hidalgo, herself a former public school teacher. “The message to all our teachers would be clear and unequivocal: Teachers matter and quality education, in their hands, matters most of all,” he added.
Luz also said that the DepEd continues to perform despite the fact that teachers continue to work under great handicaps. It is very encouraging to hear from somebody like Luz that the DepEd is seriously taking steps to make itself more relevant to its constituency.
When the Foundation for Worldwide People Power (FWWPP) launched the Education Revolution in 2002, we wanted to encourage the private sector to take a more active role in improving the quality of public education. We believed then—as we continue to believe today—that education is too important a matter to be left entirely to government. Experience shows that when the private sector mobilizes itself at the community level to make its public schools better, dramatic improvements in learning outcomes are very attainable.
Joel Pagsanghan, the son of the inimitable Sir Pagsi of Ateneo and formerly of CODE-NGO, is an acknowledged expert on community-level social development. A few months back, we asked him to take a close look at the FWWPP’s Education Revolution and see how we could make it more widespread given the prevailing conditions.
Joel saw that we already had a dual approach, which I often refer to as the two legs of the Education Revolution: the Mentoring the Mentors program, run by Ms Chinit Rufino and a team of education experts, to improve the quality of teachers; and Community Action, to make the improvement of public schools a continuing community concern. This latter program is a spin-off from the Adopt-A-School Act of 1998, also known as RA 8525.
Joel observed that a lot of elements needed for both the Community Action and the Mentoring the Mentors programs to flourish in a given community were already present. For instance, the professional bureaucracy that Luz described in his commentary has been very evident in the person of forward-thinking superintendents and school principals that we’ve had the chance to meet. Likewise, corporate citizens, most notably members of the League of Corporate Foundations, have long had continuing development and philanthropic activities in their respective business jurisdictions.
The problem is: “While all initiatives are good, they are not at a sufficient scale to make significant change,” former Education Secretary Dr. Edilberto de Jesus, one of our trustees, pointed out.
And there lies the focus of Joel’s Local Mobilization Strategy, which we call Education Revolution 2006. Simply put, Education Revolution 2006 promotes the practice of performance-based, private sector support for public schools. Several studies support the view that an increase in the volume of private sector donations to public schools does not necessarily translate into improved learning outcomes. In fact, in certain cases, such donations encourage a culture of mendicancy on the part of the benefited public schools. Joel often says that if a donor wishes to simply give a set of books to a public school, by all means the public school would accept the gift even if the latter does not have qualified librarians or even a reading program that could maximize the value of the donation. But the donation would be more meaningful if its solicitation was a consequence of the public school’s strategic plan to improve itself. The donor would have every reason to be pleased, because the assistance it has extended to the public school would serve a specific purpose other than window-dressing. Conversely, the donation adds fuel to the public school’s drive to propel itself toward excellence.
Education Revolution 2006 aims to address the problem of scale described by Dr. De Jesus through a conceptual framework and a very mobile corps of community mobilization officers, who are specially trained to facilitate a simplified strategic planning process among communities. The entire community mobilization process is designed to be simple and easily replicable by any private entity.
Education Revolution 2006 is by no means a panacea for the complex overarching problems facing public education. It is a first step toward the only viable, long-term option to fighting poverty: readily accessible quality education through our public school system.
