There
is a correlation between education and progress. A country
with highly educated citizens has high economic growth.
An individual with higher education is usually in a better
economic condition. People with little or no education are
more likely to live in poverty. Thus, education is where
the government should be giving more attention and making
more investment.
Naga
City has started doing just that by implementing a program
called “Reinventing the Naga City School Board”
to improve the public school system. Key to the program
is the empowerment of the board by building a strong body
of stakeholders at local level.
Traditionally,
local authorities have relied on the Division of City Schools
to define the education priorities that will be funded by
the special education fund (SEF) collected annually by the
city government. The 8-member school board meets early in
the year to determine how the SEF will be spent. Most often,
only two powerful members—the local chief executive
(mayor) and the division superintendent—decide on
the priorities.
Thus,
the traditional school board is practically reduced to a
budgeting body. Its involvement in delivery of education
services is weak. Its planning processes are inefficient
and ineffective since policy decisions and resource allocations
are not linked to actual needs of the city’s 36,000
public school children. The city’s 1,200 public school
teachers could hardly perform their tasks since the badly
needed “soft infrastructures”—textbooks,
reference materials, training, etc.—are not addressed.
Add to it the big number of students in the classroom, ranging
from 40 to 60.
In
the reinvented school board, the organizational structure
has been changed to ensure four elements of good governance:
transparency, accountability, participation, and predictability.
The original eight members now have voting rights. Membership
has been expanded to include representatives from the academe,
business, religious, alumni associations, and non-government
organizations. They now form the community advisory board.
Aside
from its traditional role of recommending a change in the
name of public schools and endorsing promotion of education
officials, the empowered school board now prepares local
education plan and budget with strong citizen participation.
A system has been institutionalized to make financial management
and procurement, as well as the recruitment of teachers,
transparent. Through a feedback system, education officials
are now more accountable to the public.
The
new school board had identified alternative ways of developing
and financing the local education plan by mobilizing internal
and external resources. In summer of 2003, the board supported
the teachers and supervisory staff of the Division of City
Schools in preparing ready-made lesson plans and workbooks.
These unburdened the teachers of writing daily lesson plans,
enabling them to focus on teaching more effectively in the
classroom.
The
board also launched the “Surog-Adal” program
to institutionalize the Brigada Eskwela and the “Adopt-a-School”
programs of the Department of Education. As a result, five
depressed elementary schools were adopted by the Filipino-Chinese
Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the Rotary Club of Naga
Circle, the local chapters of the Lion’s Club, and
the Philippine Institute of Civil Engineers.
In
terms of student performance, the program yielded results.
Of the elementary students who took the national achievement
test in English, Science, and Math in school year 2002-2003,
an average of 38.15% passed. In 2003-2004 an average of
50.62% passed, or an increase of 12.47%. English got the
highest increase (13.96%), followed by Math (13.01%) and
Science (10.43%).
The
Naga City experience demonstrates that a pro-active school
board, using local resources efficiently and working with
various stakeholders, can address the two major problems
of education: underinvestment in literacy initiatives and
poor management of the public school system.
