Philippine Basic Education

I remember spending one evening with other Filipino graduate students in Chicago. We had a guest from the Philippines, Rev. Bienvenido Nebres, S.J. He was on a private mission then, trying to figure out how to attract Filipino talent to return home. One of the students mentioned "a house and lot". At that time, I wondered how many Filipinos who pursued graduate studies in the sciences in the United States actually had some property back in the Philippines. In my case, I knew I had nothing. When I received my doctorate, I received a letter from a former teacher asking that I consider returning home. At that time, I knew my training was not yet done - I was in transition to the other campus of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, to begin my postdoctoral training. Evidently, starting from scratch without anything but a diploma from Illinois was clearly a challenge. I had no influential connections and my last name, although "providential", is not among the Philippines' i...

by Ernesto M. Pernia Originally posted on the Inquirer (2 April 2013) Reposted here with permission from the author Our country is among the most unequal in wealth and income distribution in Asia such that it is often associated with its more distant cousins in Latin America. World Bank data on Gini index – which goes from 0 (perfect equality) to 100 (perfect inequality) – indicate that the Philippines’ index is 43, compared with Thailand’s 40 (as of 2009), Indonesia’s 34 (2005), and Vietnam’s 36 (2008). Comes now the front-page news (Inquirer, 3/4/13) reporting Cielito Habito’s observation that the rise in aggregate wealth of the country’s 40 richest families in 2010-2011 was equivalent to 76.5 percent of the increase in the economy’s GDP during the same period. The corresponding figures were 33.7 percent in Thailand, 5.6 percent in Malaysia, and 2.8 percent in Japan. This does not mean that more than three-quarters of the Philippines’ GDP goes to the 40 families as w...

Since basic education depends on so many factors, why not build a system that takes into account all of these factors. Basic education builds the society of the future and therefore encompasses all the basic needs of a child's growth and development. The public schools of Cincinnati have been working on Community Learning Centers for the past dozen years. A Community Learning Center is a network, a partnership of community stakeholders that provide services in addition to formal basic education. These services include early childhood care, tutoring, meals after class, health checkups, adult education, and others. Since these centers have been in operation for twelve years, these setups have stood the test of time and have demonstrated sustainability. Now, the state of New York will try to copy it as reported in a Cincinnati USA news article, " CPS Model Catches on in New York ". The following cartoon used in a PowerPoint presentation captures the purpose of a Community Le...

by Ernesto M. Pernia Originally posted on  BusinessWorld , Introspective op-ed column,  31 March 2013 Reposted here with permission from the author                                               One important, if less widely discussed, reason why our nation has lagged behind its Asian neighbors has to do with inadequate spending on merit goods. A “merit good”, coined by the late renowned public economics professor of Harvard, Richard A. Musgrave (1957, 1959), is a commodity deemed that an individual or society should have on account of real need rather than ability or willingness to pay. Merit goods are a class of public goods in that they create positive externalities for society and therefore tend to be privately under-consumed and under-supplied (i.e...

With the Times' ranking of universities not showing any institution from the Philippines in the top 100, questions are raised on what must be done (at least, by some people who read the articles in this blog). Of course, there is that initial reaction calling for Philippine born scientists to return home and help improve the situation in the country. It is true that the return of expertise is badly needed. Attracting Filipino scientists abroad to return may be necessary. In the early days of this blog, I received a comment from an American scientist. It related the story of Singapore: One could try to reproduce some of what Singapore has done. Concentrate on a few key areas for development of a world-class scientific industrial infrastructure. There is no need to be comprehensive, at this point. Just concentrate on an area that the Phillipines could excel in. Use a research park (as a carrot) to lure some ex-pat talent (as well as foreign talent) to the country. Give ...

The China Post reports : Taiwan is the second best-represented country in the 2013 Asia University Rankings, with 17 universities in the top 100, according to rankings published by the Times Higher Education magazine yesterday.   Japan is the best-represented nation, with 22 universities listed, while Taiwan has 17 institutions, followed by mainland China and South Korea with 15 and 14 institutions included in the rankings, respectively.   National Taiwan University is 14th in the table, while National Tsing Hua University is ranked 27th, followed by National Chiao Tung University in 32nd place.   Phil Baty, editor of Times Higher Education Rankings, was quoted in the magazine and said in an interview with The China Post that these rankings show Taiwan's strength is its depth... ...Japan's University of Tokyo tops the 2013 Asia university rankings, followed by the National University of Singapore. South Korea takes three of the top 10 places while Hong Kong has ...

I have been living in the United States for 26 years now. This is quite some time. Four more years and it will be three decades. Speaking of three decades, it has been thirty years since the report, " A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Education Reform " was submitted by the National Commission on Excellence in Education to the United States Department of Education. Professor Jal Mehta at the Graduate School of Education at Harvard reminds us in his New York times Op-Ed piece, " Teachers - Will We Ever Learn? ", of the report that possibly started most of the massive education reforms in the country. Mehta then takes us to an examination of where public education currently stands in the US after thirty years of education reforms. Mehta laments that nothing much has really changed: "How schools are organized, and what happens in classrooms, hasn’t changed much in the century since the Progressive Era. On the whole, we still have the same teachers, in the sa...