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The ABC’s of ZTE are now common coffee-shop conversation. But the ZTE contract is not the only multibillion-peso government initiative under the media spotlight. Last Monday, Education Secretary Jesli Lapus defended the P26.4-billion Cyber Education Project (CEP) of the Department of Education.
Using satellites, the CEP will beam educational services to 90 percent of public elementary and secondary schools throughout the country or 37,794 schools, linking them to a nationwide network. The satellite network will provide 12 video channels, wireless wide area networking, local area networking and wireless Internet connection. It will be financed through a P22.77-billion loan from China, amounting to 86 percent of the project. The remaining P3.71 billion, or 14 percent, will be financed by the Philippine government.
Lapus claimed that all fears over the CEP project are due to controversies surrounding the $329-million national broadband network deal of the Philippine government and the Chinese government-owned ZTE Corp. Lapus said the CEP had not been finalized.
The CEP is different, has nothing to do with the ZTE, he said. The only similarity is that the deal is similar to the ZTE package, and that it’s being brokered with China. On Tuesday, Trade Secretary Peter Favila said that he doesn’t understand the uproar over both the NBN and CEP deals. After all, “no contract” existed.
Favila called the signed agreement between China and the Philippines a Memorandum of Understanding. “Memorandum of understanding, or misunderstanding, it depends on how you look at it. Meaning, with the Chinese and other nationalities, you can lose things in translation,” the charming secretary even tried his hand at humor. “So my joke there is either an MOU or a MOMU,” he said, meaning “ghost” in Filipino.
The contract, or memorandum of agreement, or memorandum of understanding, or whatever Favila and Sergio Apostol, President Macapagal-Arroyo’s legal adviser, would have it called, did pull a Casper on April 21. Copies of the $329-million ZTE and $460-million CEP contracts were reportedly stolen in Boao, China, the day they were signed.
“Somebody has stolen it—(all) two copies,” said Apostol. “So there’s no contract. We don’t know what kind of contract it is.” The deal, he said, did not pass through Malacañang because it was lost.
The public, naturally, only has his word for it, and there is no Jose “Joey” de Venecia III to point fingers and claim bribery, corruption and overpricing. The gentlemen defending the CEP appear to believe that for as long as no contract “exists,” CEP is a non-issue.
Let us assume, for argument’s sake, that the entire deal, as Secretary Lapus claimed, is above board and legal. Let us assume that there is no contract yet. And let us assume, although it flies in the face of current realities, that the gentlemen involved are men of unimpeachable character, and that all they care about, in their heart of hearts, are the best interests of the Filipino people. The question that must be asked is the same question that Sen. Mar Roxas asked of the ZTE deal. Is the Cyber Education Project necessary?
That education must be dealt with, and immediately, is not the debate. The CEP cannot be equated to education, it is a possible solution, and as such must respond to existing problems.
Let us concede that the problem exists. A Trends in International Mathematics and Science study ranks Filipino students at 41st in a field of 45 in Science, and 42nd in Math. A recent Unesco report ranked the Philippines 74th in terms of the Education Development Index, far below Mongolia, Vietnam, Indonesia and China. Both the National Elementary Achievement Test and National Secondary Achievement Test demonstrate how students could correctly answer less than 50 percent of exam questions.
Fifteen years ago, a congressional commission identified the need to stress basic public education, because it was the only formal schooling the majority of Filipinos were able to get. As of this year, there is a shortage of some 41,000 classrooms, requiring roughly P16 billion. That does not include the salaries of teachers; neither does it include the necessary teacher training in a country where even teachers admit they feel they are unable to teach basic English to students. At the moment, the student-teacher ratio is the worst in the region. The Philippines has an average class size of 43.9 students in public elementary schools, and 56.1 in public high schools.
The CEP proposes to deliver education through the sophisticated mechanisms of satellites, television and computers to Filipino classrooms. Without the classrooms, without the teachers, without the electric sockets to plug in the thousands of computers and televisions that have to be bought on taxpayers’ money, the CEP proposal appears to be crafted for an entirely different country.
At the moment, 51 percent of Filipinos have had only elementary education. Only 14.3 percent of rural poor Filipinos graduate from high school or have higher educational attainment. Even with multilateral and bilateral institutions pouring in millions into textbook development, stories of defective and substandard textbooks have made it into the news. It is patently obvious that reforms are necessary in many areas of public education—and investment in satellite technology is not only unsuited to the problem, it will be done at the expense of thousands of students possibly going to new classrooms. Not to mention the effectiveness of the program—how can computers and televisions be effective teachers to a class of 50, especially if real teachers are either unable or not present to apply television lessons to the individual difficulties of students?
Let us assume that the current administration sincerely wants to fulfill its constitutional duty to provide quality education. Let us assume that this deal, proposal, contract, memorandum, or whatever they want to call it, is not just another avenue for corruption. Let us assume a revolutionary new concept: that this government is in service of the Filipino. Granting all these assumptions, given the situation, it appears that the men who put together the CEP are, scientifically speaking, idiots.
And these are the men who will decide on the education of the next generation of Filipinos.
