Everyone's Business
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in the category This Week In Education
IT IS NO SECRET THAT SOME OF THE COUNTRY’S biggest corporations, plus a host of smaller ones, donate good money for education-related purposes. We do not simply mean the enviable practice of sending promising employees to institutions both here and abroad for short, intensive, advanced courses, on company expense; these are educational investments necessary for corporate growth, though they also often redound to the country’s benefit.
We mean the practice of investing in education: Endowing professorial chairs to allow some of the country’s most senior academics to earn additional income (at least at the same level as a junior manager in a multinational); donating textbooks and computers and other resources to cash-strapped schools; building and providing classrooms, as the Federation of Filipino-Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Industry has been doing for years; or even, as in the case of the Metrobank Foundation, honoring the country’s best teachers year after year.
Former Finance Secretary Ramon del Rosario Jr. estimates that the business community spends as much as P1.2 billion a year on various education-related projects. (We think the total may be higher, if the classroom-building and similar initiatives of the Chinese business associations are also taken into account.) But it is possible that business, in fact, is not getting its money’s worth.
Many of the companies which sponsor education projects do so independently of one another. No overall strategy binds the projects together. “Like our NGO counterparts, [we] achieve mixed results,” Del Rosario said. “It is time for business to act in a better coordinated and more unified manner.” In management-speak: “We must build synergies and push for genuine and sustainable reform hinged on performance and accountability across the education sector.”
Think of the possibilities. Perhaps a comprehensive teacher-recognition program, building on the Metrobank success story, can encourage more outstanding students to try teaching, and more outstanding teachers to stay in academe. What if, by pooling its resources together, the business community can help send a hundred high-potential, high-performance teachers every year to study short, intensive, advanced courses in the best schools? What if other companies based in the regions can build on the success of existing recognition programs by hosting the program winners in a lecture series in their own areas—and thus help spread both the good news of teaching and the profession’s best practices?
Think of the possibilities. Perhaps the business community and the Department of Education, in close partnership, can make a virtue out of necessity and design an overall plan for privately funded classroom-building projects. Since private enterprise will continue building classrooms anyway, perhaps it would be best to integrate all such efforts into, say, a medium-term plan. What if certain companies, which believe in investing in the communities they are located in, were to “adopt” entire areas, with final responsibility for meeting infrastructure requirements?
In the words of Del Rosario, who spoke on behalf of the newly formed Philippine Business for Education initiative: “Our corporations must begin adopting not just schools but communities. We must unleash the power of our resources for education on local levels by working hand in hand with principals and teachers, district heads, local governments, parent associations, school boards, barangay officials and local NGO partners in education.” Think of the possibilities.
“Education is everyone’s business,” Del Rosario said at last week’s PBEd forum. He got that right. The businessmen who formed PBEd were driven to work together because of the continuing decline in the quality of Philippine education. They offered a four-part plan, but it may be that the best thing they can do for the state of education is to relentlessly think long-term. That would mean putting pressure (much of it not unwelcome, we are certain) on the DepEd, to never again sacrifice long-term educational objectives for short-term goals. That would also mean investing primarily in the very young, those who are still in grade school. Businessmen know that in developing human resources, there’s no such thing as a quick fix.
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