by ALECKS P. PABICO

NAGA CITY, CAMARINES SUR — If one were to put local governments in a classroom setting, the executive body of this thriving city southwest of Metro Manila would be the overachieving nerd, the one guaranteed to garner the most medals at the end of each term.

	BICOL'S model city is trying its best to address its 'weakest link' in achieving the Millennium Development Goals: keeping schoolchildren in class to complete elementary education. [photo courtesy of Bob Ursua/NCSB]

So when Naga City received a failing grade in one of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) — achieving universal primary education — local officials characteristically lost no time in dreaming up a program aimed at improving its score. It's a situation made even more challenging by the city's demographics: one out of every three Nagueño is of school age. But as Naga City Mayor Jesse Robredo put it, “We need to address the continuing inability of our school system to ensure that no child is left behind.”

Launched in May last year, the Quality Universal Elementary Education in Naga (QUEEN) initiative is said to be a “more focused and decisive intervention” of the city government to ensure that every Nagueño child gets all the opportunities to complete primary school. Although it is a multisectoral effort, a key participant in the initiative is the school board, which helps assure funding support for the miscellaneous school fees that have to be paid by all students attending public schools. (see sidebar)

Naga City Planning Coordinator Wilfredo Prilles Jr. says that one main reason why school-age children are not showing up in class is because public education, despite a constitutional provision that guarantees free schooling up to high school, is not really free. He points out, “Parents need to pay PTA (Parent-Teacher Association) fees and other charges meant to defray the school’s operating expenses, which the national government cannot fully support.”

	Location map of Naga City courtesy of Wikipedia For an interactive map of the city, click HERE.

Obviously, though, the scheme will still not work if parents do not see to it that their children attend classes regularly. Thus, the program requires them to refrain from sending their children to work or to do errands that will force them to drop out of school. Obligated as well to be active in school activities and concerns, they have recently been organized into QUEEN parents’ associations.

It all sounds very simple, but if Naga pulls this off, it could be quite a feat. Attaining universal primary education, after all, is Goal Number 2 among the eight MDGs that are part of a global initiative to eradicate extreme poverty. The Philippines is among the 189 countries committed to achieve these goals seven years from now, but midway to the deadline, the government has admitted that it may have difficulty meeting MDG No. 2.

Indeed, even perennial achiever Naga City has been forced to recognize the same goal as its “weakest link” among the MDGs, given its not-so-good performance in two indicators: cohort survival, or percentage of grade one enrollees who reach the final elementary grade; and primary completion, or the ratio of elementary school graduates in a given schoolyear to the total number of children of official graduation age in the population.

As of schoolyear 2004-2005, Naga had a cohort survival rate of 77 percent, which meant that eight out of 10 schoolchildren who enrolled in Grade I five years prior were able to reach Grade VI. Its completion rate of 66.6 percent, meanwhile, indicated that only seven out of 10 went on to finish elementary level — a figure significantly lower than the 78 percent the city registered 16 years ago.

NATIONAL ECONOMIC and Development Authority (NEDA) data on the Bicol region also found Naga City with a low probability of meeting the 100-percent participation rate in primary education, as it managed only 79.8 percent in this measure in 2004. In previous years, Naga used to consistently hit full enrolment of all school-age children, even registering participation rates of as high as 120 percent between 1998 and 2001.

Table 1: Goal 2 — Achieve Universal Primary Education Target: Achieve universal access to primary education by 2015 Indicator: Participation rate in primary education Source: NEDA Region V MDGs Report, 2005
PROVINCE/CITY	BASELINE (1990)	CURRENT (2004)	TARGET (2015)	RATIO OF REQUIRED RATE TO AVERAGE RATE OF PROGRESS	PROBABILITY OF ATTAINING THE TARGET
PROVINCE
Albay	90.01	83.83	100	3.33	Low
Camarines Norte	87.93	84.75	100	6.10	Low
Camarines Sur	86.47	83.98	100	8.19	Low
Catanduanes	88.58	86.64	100	8.76	Low
Masbate	74.98	90.30	100	0.81	High
Sorsogon	87.24	82.74	100	4.88	Low
CITY
Iriga	88.18	72.51	100	1.91	Medium
Legazpi	91.72	72.45	100	1.56	Medium
Naga	88.20	79.80	100	2.62	Low
REGION V	85.81	85.07	100	25.68	Low

NEDA says that Bicol as a region managed to improve its education performance, even registering a 13-percentage point turnaround in cohort survival between 1990 and 2005. Yet NEDA believes that Bicol still has a low probability of meeting the 100-percent participation rate target, in large part because its net enrollment rate slipped to 85.07 percent in 2004 from 85.81 percent in 1990.

As can be expected, such news is cold comfort to Naga City, which is just not used to being among the classroom laggards. Indeed, for more than two decades, the city has been winning one award after another, mostly for exemplary and pioneering governance under the stewardship of its equally multi-awarded mayor, Robredo. Yet what probably annoys the city all the more about its education MDG red mark is the fact that in October 2006, it was hailed by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Galing Pook Foundation as having one of only nine local governments in the country with excellent localization efforts to meet the MDGs.

Earning the city a particular distinction was its Productivity Improvement Program, which aimed to professionalize the local government workforce by streamlining, eradicating red tape, and giving incentives to city hall employees — an undertaking that generated a 6.5-percent annual growth in the local economy and attracted P612 million worth of investments from 2001 to 2003.

In his 2007 State of the City report, Robredo had also highlighted the fact that Naga has achieved most of the MDG targets way ahead of schedule, basing his remarks on the draft NEDA regional progress report on the state of the MDGs in Bicol's six provinces (Albay, Camarines Norte, Camarines Sur, Catanduanes, Masbate, and Sorsogon) and three cities (Naga, Iriga, and Legazpi). This, however, could not erase the city’s dismal score on education, so QUEEN was created.