Educational reforms improve National Aptitude Test results

Manila (28 July) — Education Secretary Jesli Lapus said various reforms introduced in the country’s educational system by the Arroyo administration paved the way for the improvement in the results of the National Aptitude Test (NAT) from 43 percent in 2003 to 65 percent.

Secretary Lapus said that education got the biggest allotment in the National Appropriations Act every year during the term of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

Believing that education is the great equalizer that gives every Filipino the chance to achieve his dream, President Arroyo has placed education among her administration’s top priorities and pursued aggressively various reforms while providing them increasingly large funding.

Among these reforms, according to Secretary Lapus, are curriculum restructuring that was implemented from pre-school to higher education through the harmonization of pre-school and daycare curriculum; adoption of the Basic Education Curriculum which focused the learning areas into five: Filipino, English, Science, Math, and Makabayan; and, establishment of the Ladderized Education Program (LEP), which provided equivalency pathways from technical-vocational education to higher education.

Secretary Lapus further said that the Arroyo Administration likewise invested heavily in critical learning resources since 2001, such as the construction of more than 95,000 classrooms as of June 2009, procurement of over 135.6 million textbooks, installation of computer laboratories in 4,019 public high schools, improvement of welfare arrangements for teachers that included salary increases, reduction to only six teaching hours a day, training of school managers, and provision of scholarships and educational assistance to over 5.8 million grantees at the high school, technical-vocational and higher education levels.

Noting that teachers are the backbone of education, he stressed that the Arroyo administration allotted some P1.5 billion for teacher training and 60,000 teacher items were filled up from 2001 to 2008 to address the problem of lack of teachers.

All these helped draw significant results, among them, the doubling of enrolment in pre-school to more than 1.1 million students in school year 2008-09; the one million increase in enrollees in public elementary and secondary schools, from SY 2001-2002 to SY 2008-2009; the growing number of students who stayed in school, as cohort survival started to pick up from SY 2005-06; and, the improvements in achievement levels, as evidenced by the results of the National Achievement Tests in elementary and high school levels starting in SY 2005-06.

The President has created the Philippine Main Education Highway which is tasked to ensure that every Filipino child will have the opportunity to get high quality education through reforms in the continuum or a “seamless education”; tighter linkage of tertiary education with industry; and provision of lifelong-learning mechanisms and interventions. (PIA)