On Infrastructure and Teacher Development

Rogie Espulgar: A pleasant afternoon to all of you. It’s really an honor to be a part of this sharing engagement across the regions through the Konrad Adenauer Political and Civic Engagement Spaces.

There are a lot of teachers that show the present status of education in the Philippines, from the evolution of the curriculum, to the existing infrastructure, to the availability of learning resources, to the completeness of physical facilities in our schools, to the extent of stakeholder engagement and teacher development programs, among others.

Schools have different contexts in terms of needs and vary on how these needs are given attention. The COVID 19 pandemic was among the challenging events in the implementation of basic education in our country and Bacjawan Sur Elementary School in the municipality of Concepcion, Iloilo Philippines, where I am presently connected, faced a lot of struggles in the New Normal.

To give you a scenario of Bacjawan Sur Elementary School, it is a primary school turned into a complete elementary school because of the sudden increase of enrollment from a hundred to three-fold of that (number). This increase of the learner population was due to the presence of housing units provided to the victims of Typhoon Yolanda in 2013. There are 14 teachers catering to around 370 learners but there were only five standard classrooms for temporary learning spaces and single detached segregated toilets; handwashing facilities and water sources are also limited. These are just few of the issues and concerns that need to be addressed by a single school prior to the opening of the School Year 2020-2021 under the New Normal. Our topic is focused on infrastructure and teacher development and I will be sharing our experiences on how we thrived.

The provision of standard classrooms will take a lot of process, such as reporting to the Enhanced Basic Education Information System. It’s a data base of education statistics, sector performance indicators in public and private schools, learning centers, and other education service providers. The needs were identified and included in the planning for the allocation of funds. All the rest of the processes entailed schools to wait.

But, of course, the lack of classrooms for our learners was a need that had to be addressed immediately. Our school division provided us P400,000, enough to build six temporary learning spaces. Our local government, headed by our municipal mayor, Dr. Bañez, also provided us an additional P400,000 for the improvement of the TLS. We saved a lot of donations for an additional site for the proposed additional classrooms from the local government unit and other NGOs. Our barangay officials were also on top of giving us assistance. 

The point of sharing this is we have lots to be addressed when it comes to infrastructure. It is not only the concern of the Department of Education. In the present educational structure, our local education stakeholders can also do their share. It is indeed everyone’s responsibility to provide the best possible learning spaces for our learners. As mentioned by Mayor Rex yesterday, it really takes a village to educate a child.

The New Normal in education has the Department of Education exploring different learning modalities to cater to the various needs of our learners, and this is a new experience on the part of our teachers. When we started distance education, each school prepared the contextualized learning continuity plan adopted from Department Order No. 12 Series of 2020. From each school, the interventions were laid down to ensure learning continuity, and that includes capacity building of teachers. We went through a series of training to include LDM 1 or what we call the Learning Delivery Modalities for administrators, and the Learning Delivery Modality 2 for our teachers. These short term courses capacitate teachers to handle distance education and it is on its second year of implementation. Each school is also conducting SLACs or what we call the School Learning Action Cells based on DepEd Order No. 35 series of 2016. What we do in SLACs is we have sessions conducted by groups of teachers engaged in collaborative learning sessions to solve shared challenges encountered within the context of the school. A lot of virtual trainings were conducted by our division, our regional office, and our DepEd central office on different topics to include the preparation of the contextualized self-learning modules, capacity building of our LSAs or the Learning Support Aids, mental health, and psycho-social support, to mention a few.

While we believe that DepEd is facing a lot of cuts focusing on infrastructure and teacher development, school principals are empowered by Republic Act 9155, where decentralization takes place. It’s really in the hands of our school heads to improve operations through the proper utilization of financial and human resources. I believe that the successful implementation of basic education in the Philippines even during this time of the pandemic will lie mostly in the capacity of school leaders to navigate the school.

I am Mr. Rogie Gonzales Espulgar, the school principal. It is my priority to provide quality education to our Filipino learners. Para sa bata, para sa bayan.

Alina Reiss: it’s different from the other perspective that we’ve heard so far. So, because you put a lot of esteem on the role of principals in delivering quality education, what would you share as the best practices in difficult times that we could take home to our own schools and check whether certain things are in place or planned in the same way?

RE: This pandemic really affected the implementation of education in the Philippines, not only in our locality, but also in the whole Philippines. And if there is one thing that I have learned in my 15 years of teaching, is that education is really a shared responsibility. If we want to get the most in providing basic education to our students, we must involve all the stakeholders. We must involve the whole school and the community. More than ever, during this time of the pandemic, the more that we involve our parents, the guardians, our local government unit, our community members, the more we can provide more quality, accessible, relevant basic education delivery. It really takes a village to educate a child, so if you want to provide quality education, you have to help each other—all the members of the community must be involved.

AR: So how do you do about it? Do you have a parents’ roundtable? How easy is it to engage the parents and what are your mechanisms to engage other stakeholders, especially in COVID times, which makes it more difficult?

RE: When we started distance learning, most of our students in the Philippines had module print learning modalities, meaning self-learning modules. The teachers are not there. The learners are learning at home. We talked with our parents, our guardians, members of the family who can provide technical assistance to our students. They served as learning support. So, before we conducted the School Year 2020-2021, we prepared a school learning continuity plan on how to go about the very next school year. We wanted to involve all the education stakeholders. We conducted meetings with our parents, with our local officials, and we have this collaboration with the LGUs. The question was, who will be serving as learning support aids of our learners? And so we utilized our parents and guardians. We provided trainings to our parents, we taught them how to go about accomplishing the learning support materials of our learners. It’s not easy, much more because we find it difficult to communicate with our learners. It’s either we conduct home visits or call those learners who have mobile phones. And that’s one thing that we have to strengthen in the distance learning education that we have, that is, providing learning support to our learners. This is how parents and guardians play an important role in the delivery of distance learning.

AR: As a principal, what kind of support do you wish for from the government?

RE: I think if there is one thing that I would like to improve in the implementation of distance learning in this time of pandemic is the Internet connection. Majority of our schools in the Philippines have no stable Internet connection and we know that most of our learning competencies are through the Internet. We want to have that stable Internet connection for us to improve our teaching and learning processes. In Concepcion, there are 36 schools, including high schools and I think only the mainland schools can access Internet connection. Those schools in the islands, in the mountains, can hardly reach the signal for the Internet connection, so I would appeal to the government that if there is one thing that we want to improve in the Department of Education: some of our curriculum, our competencies require Internet connection and so there are some things that we cannot do and that are beyond our control.

AR: We have someone from the audience asking whether the online learning platforms are free of charge. Are they available or do you use your own applications to facilitate student learning? How do you do it in your school?

RE: As what I have mentioned earlier, in the municipality of Concepcion, or even in the school division of Iloilo in the Philippines, majority of our learners are learning through our self-learning modules. So, we may combine Internet connectivity platforms but we are mainly using printed modules. The parents get the modules from the school, then these will be answered by our learners at home. We hardly use the Internet in this time of the pandemic because of issues in the Internet connection. So, I can say that majority of our learners are using printed modules instead of the Internet.

On Governing/Implementing Education: Translating Policies into Action

The Philippine education system is rather complex and quite dispersed across a large archipelago and it is quite fragmented, comprised of many multiple moving parts, very diverse. We have one Department of Education but it is being implemented in 17 regions, and each of the regions is divided into about 8 to 14, 15 school divisions. So, we have about 225 across the country, and each of the school divisions has quite a number of school districts, about 2,200 all over the country, 62,000 public schools, about 8,500 private schools, over 900,000 public school teachers, or about a million if you add the private school teachers.

It is a complex system and, on top of that, we have an autonomous region in Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Moslem Mindanao, which is not under the Department of Education but which functions like the Department of Education.

If you take a look at the system, there are what I call creative tensions and I say “creative” rather than “destructive” tensions. They are actually good for the system, but if you don’t manage them properly, they can get out of control.

The first tension is centralized control over the entire system versus decentralized operations. Standards are set at the central office but the interpretation of the standards are done in the regions. As a result, you can have different interpretations of what those standards can be. So there is tension, division, between the DepEd central office and the regions in this regard.

There is also tension between the Department of Education and local stakeholders, such as the local governments, who do not report to the Department of Education but where the local school boards, for example, are controlled. The local school boards are part of the local governments and so they can, they should, follow what the Department of Education is mandating or saying. However, that’s not necessarily always the case. So there is that tension between local governments and the Department of Education.

I will explain.

Local context matters. There are a lot of demographic, socio-economic, socio-political situations on the ground in a particular place or locality, which can have an impact or effect on education.

The first is income class disparities that continue today. So, if you take a look:

The poor-to-low-income classes are about 40.5% of the population, of all families.

Lower middle-income is about 36% of all families.

Middle-middle to upper middle-income is about 20.7% of all families.

And the upper income and rich only account for about two and a half percent of all families.

This context will have an impact because the low-income and the lower middle-income families are the ones who are, in terms of equity, the most disadvantaged, and so their numbers tend to be lower in terms of participation, compared to the higher income groups.

The second tension is with reference to ethnicity and language. If you take a look at the country, the Department of Education has recognized 19 language groups, so in the very early years, the mother tongue instruction is done in those local language groups before it transitions to English and Filipino, which is the national language. You can imagine the tension here because kids in the many outlying areas do not speak English or Filipino as the language at home. They speak their local language or dialect. Then, you have local norms and this is especially among the very rural remote areas and certain indigenous communities, where you have child marriage, for example, which takes kids out of school. And in very, very poor communities, you have child labor, which also takes kids out of school. These are some of the contexts that we have to be aware of in terms of policy recommendations.

Let me say a few things about policy setting. When you set a policy, you are setting a direction for everybody. Once you set that policy, it applies to all, so we want a policy that benefits the vast majority of society. Even with the best policy, you will have gainers, you will have losers. The key is to have the gainers far outnumber the losers or those who are losing. You want to make sure that the value of the loss is not too large that it will cause problems in implementation even if they are the minority. Remember, in situations where you have losers, especially very vocal losers, the vocal minority can lead a revolt and this can cause problems for everybody in the system.

If there are losers in the system, you want to make sure that there is a way by which you can pick up the losers, especially those who fall along the margins or fall between the cracks. And here, you use affirmative action programs to pick these groups up. The policy applies to everybody but the affirmative action program can be targeted to certain groups to make sure that these groups can be picked up and brought back to the system.

The other thing is you have the structurally disadvantaged. Here, you have structural barriers in society that can exclude groups wittingly or unwittingly. Here are some examples. In the Philippines, we have what is called GIDA (Geographically Isolated and Disadvantaged Areas). These are areas which are so remote that they tend to be forgotten and left out of the system. So, the Department of Education, a couple of years ago, articulated a program called “Last Mile Schools” to try to reach out to these communities to make sure that schooling, education services were available to them.

Unfortunately, GIDA or “Last Miles” areas are also the most expensive to reach on a per capita basis. One, is because they are isolated. Two, because they have no infrastructure, so you have to develop that infrastructure. Or you may not have the human resources. You have to move human resources out there and not everybody wants to move to isolated areas, so this can be very expensive but needs to be done. Unfortunately, in this pandemic, it has been put on the backburner and we have to get back to it because there are a few thousand schools or quite a few areas where this is a problem.

Then, you have historically discriminated communities. An example of this would be the Moslem-Filipinos. We are a predominantly Catholic Christian nation and, historically, the Moslem-Filipino population has been discriminated or left out. That is why there is an autonomous region dealing with this, where the Moslem-Filipino population is the majority. We need to be constantly aware of this because there are Moslem-Filipino communities in the general area not within the autonomous region.

Then, we have the migrant worker communities. These are communities that move around and, because they move around, they tend not to have basic social services, including education, and they tend to be discriminated and left out. We need to make sure that we are always aware of this.

Let me go to this pandemic. The Philippine government closed all schools at all levels to face-to-face instruction on March 2020. This is the longest closure in the world, I believe, certainly in Southeast Asia. What’s happened, in fact, it’s only last week that a handful of schools, 100 public schools and 20 private schools, were allowed to open face to face instruction. This is a drop in the bucket compared to the total number of schools, which is about 62,000 schools all over the country. The government has allowed these schools to open face-to-face on a limited, pilot basis. The reality of it is all the other schools had to continue distance learning. And the problem is, when this happened last year and up to today, the Department of Education, the schools, and the communities were not ready for distance learning.

The second reality, and this is what I want to point out, is large parts of the country have zero or very few COVID 19 cases. The question I have is, why shut down areas with no or few COVID cases because the National Capital Regions and the neighboring areas or large metropolitan areas have numerous cases? Or, why is there a one-size-fits-all policy? It doesn’t make any sense. We could have learned from the rest of ASEAN, where schools have been opened for many months, over a year, and in some countries, continue to do aggressive testing, set up protocols, shut down schools and quarantine them if COVID cases occur, and are starting to vaccinate teachers and students. So, there are ways. Other countries have done it, so why couldn’t the Philippines do it? I think this is a real shortcoming in terms of our policy.

Thank you.