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Thursday, March 28, 2024

Build back education

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“The government and the private sector must join forces.”

 

Today is National Heroes Day, a holiday to honor the bravery and sacrifice of all our heroes who have fought for our nation’s freedom. In the current pandemic context, heroism has evolved from the model of revolutionary freedom fighters who honorably fought to the death to a spectrum of frontliners who are now fighting an unprecedented existential threat because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Seventeen months since the first ECQ, we’ve seen how this crisis has shocked all industries and all sectors of our society. Among the hardest hit is the private education sector which now suffers from very low enrollment, forcing many schools to shut down operations and displacing not just school employees but the whole ecosystem of small businesses that rely on school operations.

As of this writing the latest data of the Department of Education as of August 27, 2021 counts only a total of 313,958 enrollees in private schools even as some have already started classes. Compare this with last year’s two million enrollees which was already a 50-percent drop from a pre-pandemic level of 4.4 million students. DepEd data also show that the low enrollment and the lack of capacity to conduct distance learning will cause the closure of at least 865 small private schools all over the country.

COVID-19 has created a global education crisis. According to a recent article published in the Global Education Monitoring Report of UNESCO entitled Mission: Recovering Education: “The COVID-19 pandemic has been the worst shock to education systems in a century, with the longest school closures combined with the worst recessions in decades. More than 1.6 billion children have lost instructional time for many months at a time, if not for much of the last year, and many children are still not back in school. School closures and the resulting disruptions to school participation and learning are projected to amount to losses valued at $10 trillion in terms of affected children’s future earnings.”

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Assistant Director-General for Education of UNESCO Stefania Giannini earlier this year said, “At least 24 million children and youth are expected not to return to school because of the economic impact of the crisis alone. Without making education a pillar of recovery plans alongside health, jobs and climate, societies will fuel rather than reverse rising inequality, poverty and social divides.”

Giannini points out:“The most vulnerable have been hardest hit. The pandemic widened inequalities, amplifying a pre-existing learning crisis.”

“The first imperative is to reopen schools safely and inclusively, taking every measure to protect the health and well-being of learners, teachers and educators. For this, the world’s 100 million teachers and educators must be considered a priority group in vaccination campaigns. They are frontline workers and the most important actors in the educational recovery,” Giannini said.

Here in the Philippines, the situation is made worse by a policy crisis that is causing even more burden to our private schools who are already in dire straits. This is the controversial revenue regulation (BIR RR 5-2020) that if implemented would have jacked up income taxes of private schools by 150 percent. Instead of focusing resources and energies to getting schools safe and ready for the academic year, the sector had to mount a strong protest against this ill-conceived tax measure that legislators and civil society have pointed out as illegal and downright heartless.

In a laudable demonstration of responsiveness, the House of Representatives has quickly passed on Third Reading with 203 votes and no objections House Bill 9913 to define with finality the tax rates for proprietary schools consistent with the 10-percent preferential tax rate mandated in the constitution.

In a recent published statement, Chairman of the Coordinating Council of Private Educational Associations and President of the Philippine Association of Colleges and Universities Anthony Jose M. Tamayo Ph.D. said, “This legislative policy intervention, once enacted into law, will provide the needed stability to education not only in this time of pandemic but also for generations to come, as it aligns with all existing and future initiatives to revive our battered economy.”

The ball is now in the court of the Senate that has likewise acted on its version (Senate Bill 2272) even during the Congressional break and is anticipated to likewise see fast approval with the majority of its members already supporting the bill.

Private educational institutions are indispensable in our education system. Public and private schools must be strengthened to perform their complementary roles in delivering quality education that will build a morally strong, prosperous, and resilient society with the competitiveness to excel in the emerging digital economy. Like the economy, our education system needs both policy and investment stimuli to recover. The government and the private sector must join forces to empower our teachers and schools to build back from this crisis.

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