Going back to basics

Aggravating our public education's perennial problem of shortages - of classrooms, teachers, textbooks and other facilities - is an acute lack of vision on the part of our top school managers.

Over the past decade and a half, the top leadership of the DepEd has failed to update, modernize and employ education technologies to raise school standards. But despite the continuous deterioration of the quality of education, we still see some outstanding graduates from the public schools. But this surprising turnout of achievers is not sustainable.

The problem basically lies in DepEd's inability to manage scarce resources. To start with, it has poor statistical information - its enrolment numbers, student-classroom ratio, student-teacher ratio, and results of the national achievement test are often questionable.

A lack of solid statistical foundation has caused the skewed assessment of both the needs and progress of our schools. Hence, despite the national consensus to allocate more for public schools, the benefits of these budget increases are seldom reflected, or shown to be demonstrably more than the cost.

Our new DepEd secretary, Jesli Lapus, is a former banker and a trained manager. Let's hope he will bring his managerial expertise to solving the problems plaguing our schools.