by KAROL ANNE M. ILAGAN

In faraway Maguindanao and nearby Las Piñas, more children are failing to enroll and stay in school, and the ratio of students to teachers, classrooms and books is getting worse. These problems gain more urgency as schools start preparing for the opening of the new schoolyear in the next fortnight.

LAS PIÑAS CITY — When the latest results of the National Achievement Test (NAT) for Grade 6 students came out in June 2007, this southern Metro Manila city got the fourth highest score in the National Capital Region (NCR), adding yet another item in Las Piñas’s growing list of achievements.

	THE Las Piñas city hall. [photo by Angelo Regalado]

An important residential, commercial and industrial city for decades now, Las Piñas enjoys one of the highest per capita income in the NCR and has almost 90 percent of its labor force employed. Its local government has also been recognized for its massive social development projects, and has consistently been a recipient of awards for good governance and excellent city management.

But to officials and education leaders in Las Pinas, the city's students could have performed better and landed No. 1 in the NAT, which assesses the abilities and skills of Grade 6 pupils in all public and private elementary schools.

And it’s not just because this is a city that is particularly driven to excel. It’s also because a better learning environment for pupils and more efficient working conditions for teachers in the city would have probably yielded higher NAT scores for its students, says Dr. Yolanda Quijano, Bureau of Elementary Education (BEE) chief.

	NEXT PART 3 looks at the funds and records mess in the DepEd ARMM, resulting to delayed salaries of teachers, and the siphoning of funds by "ghost" schools and teachers. PREVIOUSLY PART 1 looks at Maguindanao, where the situation is made worse by bursts of armed conflict that keep students and their teachers away from schools for days on end, as well as by apparently skewed priorities.

SHORTAGE OF TEACHERS
Unfortunately, for several years now, Las Piñas has been experiencing severe teacher-and-classroom shortage. This, in turn has consistently earned the city red marks in the Department of Education (DepEd)’s Basic Education Information System (BEIS), and compromised as well the kind of education its public schools have been offering students.

	Location map of Las Piñas courtesy of Wikipedia

In general, there is greater access to public schools in cities than in provinces. But the quality of education being offered in urban areas may not necessarily be better. In Las Piñas, the ever-growing number of enrollees to its public schools each year has put a strain on a system already suffering from insufficient funding, ensuring that learning conditions here would be poor.

Some of the city’s public schools have even resorted to holding three shifts of classes to accommodate a constant surge in the number of students, who are crammed cheek by jowl into classrooms where teachers are literally up against a wall the whole time.

“It’s noisy when there are many students (in a room),” says Angie San Buenaventura, who will be in fifth grade this June at Talon Elementary School. “It’s hot, too, it makes me want to sleep most of the time.”

“When you should be writing,” says 11-year-old Christian Alimento of Doña Manuela Elementary School, “you just wipe and wipe your sweat.”

COMMITTED, DEDICATED
That Las Piñas’s students still managed to score well in the NAT despite these conditions is laudable. According to University of the Philippines College of Education Dean Dr. Vivien Talisayon, much of that achievement could only be because of the teachers’ apparent commitment to their work and the pupils’ determination to learn.

Large class sizes are never good for learning, says Talisayon. The international standard, she says, is 30 students per class, but in local city schools like those in Las Piñas, a class of 60 to 70 has become the norm.

DepEd data show that in schoolyear 2007-2008 alone, the city’s pupil-classroom ratio was 122.76, meaning more than 100 pupils used one classroom each day. This was the highest pupil-room ratio posted in the NCR in that period. Pasig and San Juan had the lowest in the region with 49.76.

Las Piñas also had the worst pupil-teacher ratio in the NCR during the past schoolyear, with 50.54 students to one teacher. By comparison, the national mean ratio is only within 35 to 40.

The teacher-and-classroom shortage plagues many public schools across the country. But the problem is so serious in Metro Manila that it is believed to be among the main reasons why the NCR has trouble keeping children in school — and why the region is helping keep the country from achieving universal primary education by 2015.

The shortage, after all, is not only a matter of students having no elbowroom or having to fight for the teacher’s attention. Says Talisayon: “A teacher has to be very good — top of the line — to handle a large class. If you can’t even know or memorize the names of your students then you’re like strangers there (in the classroom).”

An overcrowded classroom limits the teacher's ability to deliver lessons effectively and to manage the class properly. “It’s hard to arrange group activities if they can hardly move,” says the education expert. “If the teachers want to see what the students are actually doing, they might need to use a telescope, and they definitely have to project their voice.”