|
By Yvonne T. Chua
Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism
Conclusion
JUST AS classes were ending last March, the
Payatas-A Elementary School in Quezon City found itself being asked
to accept a delivery for 750 boxes of textbooks. Marivic Panganiban,
a principal in the school that serves the congested squatter
community of 75,000 people in Payatas, says the books had been
intended for the schoolyear that was then drawing to a close.
Panganiban rejected the books initially, because
she had nowhere to store them. But the Department of Education (DepEd)
instructed her to accept them, so she did. She converted a toilet
into a storeroom and filled every available space on the second
floor with as many books as she could. She put the rest in a hall on
the ground floor, where they now lie soaked in rainwater.
Most of the books were supposed to be
distributed to the districts over which the Payatas school acts as
head office. Publishers deliver elementary school books to schools
districts that in turn take care of distributing these to an average
of eight to nine schools. High school titles are delivered directly
to the schools.
Up to now, however, many of the
books–including the soaked ones remain unclaimed
because, Panganiban says, “the principals don’t have the money
to rent vehicles to claim the books. They would have to wait until
June 16 when they raise the money through the sales in their canteen
and the school feeding program.” She has heard that the DepEd will
release a hauling fee of P1 per book, but the principal says she has
yet to receive official word of this.
Panganiban has more textbook woes. Despite a
textbook inventory showing Quezon City as already experiencing an
oversupply of books in the core subjects, Payatas-A Elementary
School remains plagued by a shortage of textbooks for its 5,000-plus
pupils. It has no books in Filipino for its pupils in fourth grade
and no books in English for those in fifth grade.
This is a story that has become all too common
for DepEd officials. Even as they promise that this schoolyear, many
of the country’s 17.3 million public school children would no
longer have to share textbooks in at least three core subjects in
the lower grade levels, DepEd officials concede that they still have
many obstacles to hurdle before they can give every child a textbook
in all the five core subjects: English, Social Studies, Science,
Math and Filipino.
Indeed, the DepEd constantly worries over
whether or not textbooks–the right quantity, the right quality,
the right title–are reaching schools and students. Another
constant source of trouble is the phenomenon of the multiple
textbook titles for one subject, sometimes as many as 10 to a
subject.
Thus, while DepEd statistics show a 1:1
textbook-pupil ratio for Science, Math and Filipino in the lower
grade levels, the reality on the ground is far more complicated.
Says Undersecretary Juan Miguel Luz: “Actually our ratio is
meaningless. I don’t put too much trust in the figure. It’s the
supply side figure–it’s the total number of books that have been
printed and bought by the department divided by the grade-level
population.”
Luz concedes there are “mind-boggling”
problems in the government’s textbook procurement scheme. Other
officials, for instance, say that Payatas-A Elementary School’s
textbook shortage is due to the misallocation of books among the
schools in Quezon City. Unfortunately, it is a situation that is
repeated in many other parts of the country.
According to the Commission on Audit (COA),
there have also been delayed deliveries by suppliers and defective
deliveries–such as double pictures, cut human figures, unreadable
text and wrong margin sizes–in at least four regions.
Still, there have been improvements in the
country’s textbook procurement system. Infused with generous loans
from the World Bank and Asian Development Bank, the DepEd’s
centralized procurement is now even being called a success story.
The reforms have resulted in an improved public
perception of the DepEd. The Social Weather Stations’
2002-2003 Surveys of Enterprises show the department scoring a
positive 43 in its net sincerity in fighting corruption, up from
negative nine in 2000, when it was hounded by a corruption scandal
involving textbook purchases.
Publishers themselves say that textbook-title
evaluation is now more objective. At present, the DepEd uses
numerical ratings, recruit evaluators from the private sector (they
accounted for a third of the 180 evaluators in the last bidding),
strip books of the cover, title page and other marks that would give
away the author’s and the publisher’s identities, and hold the
evaluation in an undisclosed place.
Probably the only complaints from publishers
these days are that titles that passed one bidding need be to
resubmitted for evaluation during the next bidding and are not
automatically included in the DepEd’s catalog of approved books
that its field offices are allowed to buy.
But textbook biddings have not fully escaped
allegations of irregularities. In Congress, Reps. Vicente A.
Sandoval of Palawan and Aniceto Saludo Jr. of Southern Leyte
demanded an inquiry into the latest bidding for projects funded by
the World Bank, chiefly because of “the extreme haste at which
evaluation of the bids was conducted which took only 30 days.” (DepEd
records show the process actually took longer than that, starting
from the bid opening on Nov. 13, 2002 to the release of the final
notice of award to the winning publishers on Feb. 18.)
Then again, while appearing before Congress,
DepEd officials were handed an unsigned note by a legislator asking
that a consortium of publishers be named one of the winners. Says a
DepEd official of what he describes as “indirect pressure” from
the lawmaker: “We were taken aback, but we didn’t concede.”
The DepEd says it already has enough trouble
policing its own backyard, suspecting that corruption persists even
in its revamped and strictly monitored centralized procurement.
Admits Luz: “At the end of the day, we feel we cannot get the
right numbers.”
The DepEd has reason to smell something fishy.
The COA reports that there have already been underdeliveries of
38,438 textbooks procured under the World Bank-funded Social
Expenditures Management Program (SEMP) in the divisions of Quezon
City, Lipa City, Quirino province and Dumaguete-Siquijor.
Government Watch or G-Watch, a project of the
nongovernmental Philippine Government Forum, detected discrepancies
between reports of actual delivery of SEMP books at the central
office and delivery receipts received at 29 schools districts in
Bulacan, Quezon, Cebu, Iloilo and Misamis Oriental.
G-Watch’s report says nothing about
corruption, stating simply that records at DepEd’s central and
district offices did not match, and schools divisions were not
furnished copies of the delivery receipt and did not have a
consolidated report on the deliveries.
But the Instructional Materials Council
Secretariat, which coordinates procurement of SEMP books and now
titles under the Third Elementary Education Project (TEEP, also
funded by the World Bank), is bothered by what it suspects are
forged signatures of school personnel on some inspection and
acceptance reports submitted by winning publishers. In one instance,
too, only one person signed for all the books intended for 20
schools districts when there ought to have been 20 different
signatories.
DepEd’s Luz, meanwhile, fears some of the
publishers have underdelivered to generate savings. After all, the
drastic drop in the prices of textbooks sold to the central office
(as much as 40 percent) has left publishers with very slim profit
margins.
To further complicate matters, several districts
in Caloocan, Mandaluyong and Quezon cities have failed to distribute
the SEMP books to schools under them, says COA. In Mandaluyong,
books delivered by a publisher on April 30, 2001 were given to
schools only on June 1, 2002.
These kinks leave a black mark on an otherwise
impressive record of some publishers who have braved tough terrains,
bad transportation systems, calamities and conflicts to deliver the
books. SD Publications, which has consistently won in the DepEd
textbook biddings since 1999, has even gotten help from New
People’s Army rebels in the north and requested military escorts
down south. SD administrative officer Arne Madrilejos says, “The
rebels helped when they saw we were bringing textbooks for the
children.”
In an unprecedented move, the DepEd is now
involving civil society–G-Watch, Procurement Watch, Namfrel and
Mincode, among others–parent-teachers associations and other
groups to monitor the deliveries of the millions of textbooks bought
under the SEMP and TEEP to all the 6,000 delivery points. It has
also set common delivery dates for publishers, who are now being
asked to deliver within five days to a provincial division and three
days to a city division. And as a safeguard against forged
signatures, the DepEd has updated specimen signatures of authorized
receiving personnel.
Winning publishers welcome the participation of
civil-society monitors, saying this will ensure transparency. But
they say the five- and three-day delivery timetables may be
unrealistic in big schools divisions like Pangasinan, Camarines Sur,
Cebu, Bohol and Iloilo, each of which have more than 100 high
schools.
And while the DepEd’s new efforts may help
take care of the deliveries, the multiple titles fiasco may take
even more doing to correct. Laundrywoman Lucy Tipanin, for
instance, recounts how she began to notice that her son, now nine
years old, often did not do his homework. Tipanin, a Quezon City
resident, says she found out that the reason was that the boy could
not locate the assignments in his books.
Each school year, her son had been getting a
textbook in all the core subjects, save for Sibika. The teachers,
however, were using textbooks different from those the boy had. In
fact, only a handful of his classmates received books that matched
those that the teachers were basing the lessons on.
At first, Tipanin’s son tried borrowing the
“right” books from his luckier classmates. But he gave up when
other pupils proved much quicker in borrowing them.
The problem can be traced partly to the 1995
passage of Book Publishing Industry Development Act, which
dismantled the government’s 20-year textbook monopoly. The DepED
used to prescribe one title in one subject for all the public
schools. It bought the rights to titles from private publishers and
then printed millions of copies for public schools.
The new law allowed local publishers to sell
titles to public schools (provided the titles get into DepEd’s
list of approved textbooks). DepEd also let principals choose the
books themselves.
By 2000, schools had a choice of 458 titles or
as many as 12 textbooks per subject, per grade. Many ended up with
various titles for one subject. Says the COA: “There were cases
where students did not have a common book for each subject.”
In some schools, as many as 10 titles in one
subject were distributed to just one class, says Luz. Other schools
had teachers who picked one title and put the others, especially the
non-SEMP titles, in storage. In the end, four to 12 students were
sharing one book.
Ironically, procurement made through foreign
loans seems to have worsened the situation in some subjects. DepEd
has conducted three rounds of procurement under SEMP since 1999. A
number of titles that won the first round were replaced by other
titles in the second and yet another set in the third.
In addition, textbooks bought under the TEEP and
the Asian Development Bank-supported Secondary Education Development
and Improvement Project (SEDIP) were not always similar to those
bought through SEMP. Three biddings held under SEMP and SEDIP have
resulted in three different titles being bought for Araling
Panlipunan in first year high school.
There were also the textbooks schools divisions
bought using their operating funds or local money. On many
occasions, these were different from the SEMP, TEEP and SEDIP
titles. In Quezon City, for example, DepEd supplied “Math for
Everyday Life” for third grade, the schools division bought
“Math for Everyday Use,” and the local school board ordered
“Keeping Up with Math.”
Madrilejos’s theory is that some schools
divisions and local governments could not order a number of the
titles under the foreign-funded projects because these are not yet
included in the DepEd’s catalog of approved textbooks. The catalog
was last updated in 2000.
A Quezon City-based publisher, however, says
purchases of some schools divisions and local governments have been
influenced by the amount of bribes publishing houses offered,
resulting in school and local officials deliberately disregarding
accredited titles.
DepEd is now working on a textbook
redistribution scheme. Luz says it would be “a statistical
nightmare,” but the DepEd has already told education officials to
allocate whole sets of textbooks to schools. Later, it may set up
local trading stations so schools can swap titles and accumulate
enough similar titles for a class.
In the meantime, Lucy Tipanin frets that her son
is slowly losing interest in school partly because he lacks the
proper books. Her son’s grades are falling, she says.
DepEd officials know they need to make more
refinements in their textbook and other programs if the academic
performance of public schoolchildren is to improve.
The national averages in the 2002 national
diagnostic tests in English, Math and Science were a low 38 percent
to 42 percent in grade school, and 28 percent to 30 percent in high
school. The figures are hardly a leap from those posted five years
before, when public-school children were found to be learning only
about a third of the skills they should have been taught.
Part 1
|
