Educating teachers
“While education levels vary from country to country, there is a clear correlation between the quality of a country’s educational system and its general economic status and overall well-being. In general, developing nations tend to offer their citizens a higher quality of education than the least developed nations do and fully developed nations offer the best quality of education of all. Education is clearly a vital contributor to any country’s overall health.”
That’s how the worldpopulationreport.com prefaced its report on the 2023 Education Rankings By Country which was anchored on the idea that education “is considered to be a human right and plays a crucial role in human, social and economic development.”
Education, the comparative study said, impacts human rights as it “promotes gender, equality, fosters peace and increases a person’s chance of having more and better life and career opportunities.”
A joint effort of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, the BAV Group, and the US News and World Report, the annual Best Countries Report, in keeping with its past issuances, delegated an entire section for education.
The ranking was based on a survey of thousands of people across 78 countries, with the quality of education being based on equally weighted attributes, including the preferences of people to go to colleges and universities of a particular country.
The top 10 countries for 2023 based on the 2021 survey were, from the top, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, France, Switzerland, Japan, Australia,
Sweden and The Netherlands.
The report noted that while the United States had the “best-surveyed education system” in the world, US students were found to consistently score lower in math and sciences compared to students from many other countries. Citing a Business Insider report, the US was claimed to have ranked 38th in math scores and 24th in science.
At the bottom of the list of 78 countries were Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali, Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Guinea, Pakistan, Gambia, and Angola.
The Philippines was on the 55th spot in the 2021 survey from 52nd in the 2020 poll. It trailed neighboring Japan, 7th place; South Korea, 19th ; Singapore, 21st; China, 22nd; Malaysia, 38th; Thailand, 46th; and Indonesia, 54th.
It is against this backdrop of the perceived quality of Philippine education needing a lot of catching up to do both at the regional and global levels that the Marcos government’s push to provide quality education to teachers, under the Philippine Development Plan or PDP 2023-2028, should be seen.
Included in the PDP 2023-2028 is the full implementation of Republic Act 11713, otherwise known as the Excellence in Teacher Education Act, which was signed into law last year by then-President Rodrigo Duterte.
The law overhauls the Teacher Education Council to put the Department of Education, the Commission on Higher Education and the Professional Regulation Commission on the same page in charting the education of Filipinos from the elementary to the tertiary level so the learning ladder leads up, is not disjointed and is at par with global standards to make employable graduates of Filipinos.
As envisioned under RA 11713, the TEC is empowered to set the standards of teacher education programs to make them coherent.
The PRC, as the body tasked to administer licensure examinations to aspiring professionals, including teachers, plays an important role in gauging the quality of teachers.
The numbers coming out of the PRC are not encouraging for the eight-year period ending in 2022, the average licensure passing rate for teachers at the elementary level was a mere 34 percent and just 40 percent at the secondary level.
Educating teachers well has a direct correlation with the quality of students, it should be pointed out, with quality education coming from quality teachers. This may have been in the mind of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. when he approved the PDP 2023-2023 last 16 December to push economic and social transformation by producing competitive graduates.
With RA 11713, the Second Congressional Commission on Education Act (RA 11899) should pave the way for the conduct of a national assessment program for teachers.
“The average licensure passing rate for teachers at the elementary level was a mere 34 percent and just 40 percent at the secondary level.
“The numbers coming out of the PRC are not encouraging for the eightyear period ending in 2022.