Wednesday, December 8, 2010

School Leadership

Being an administrator is not easy. You can encounter several problems and issues in your workplace. There are so many pressing educational issues here in our country. According to Dr. Francis Thaise Cimene, Dean of the Graduate School in Capitol University, these pressing educational issues are: (a) many in-coming students especially in the basic education (due to an ever increasing population) but not enough teachers, school buildings, and books; (b) Poverty hinders children to go to school (and the number is increasing every year): they don’t have money for fare, tuition, school supplies; they have to work to augment the family income to meet the basic needs; (c) The educational system is faulty. Students perform poorly in national achievement tests. One reason is pedagogy. Higher order thinking skills are not mastered.

I agree with Dr. Cimene. These are the real situations in our educational system in the Philippines. Administrators are trying their best to make use of the limited resources; teachers give their share of personally helping the students though they are underpaid; with limited learning materials, teachers try to innovate. Sad to say innovations are not fast and sufficient enough to create an impact on the kind of education the Philippines need to move forward. The government is putting in new secretaries (Deped and CHED) from time to time (say less than 2 years) to troubleshoot the problems. What more could they do? The constitution spells out clearly that every Filipino should have access to quality education that will result in improved quality of life for all citizens. If all stakeholders from government, educational sectors, church, business sectors, families, and individuals will think critically at this point and think about the value of education to obtain the quality of life, there is hope in solving these problems. The government should increase the budget for education; the education sector should make education relevant to what we really need to obtain that quality of life we are aiming for; at least someone has to start/initiate and others have to cooperate.

Educational administrators’ roles are to influence policy-makers to make the policies that would address the issues raised. We have many sound laws and they are even copied by other countries. Administrators should be innovative and creative in the implementation of these educational laws such as the empowerment act of the school administrators. Administrators see to it that objectives of the school have corresponding plan of action, but these should be monitored and evaluated periodically to check whether we are achieving our objectives. The low performance of our students should be a wakeup call for the school administrators.

Although global framework should be appreciated, what we need now is the local perspective. Once we have stabilized our own issues, that’s the time we can explore global perspectives. Educators should see to it that students learn how to think. The best way to teach them how to think is to give them problems to solve. The process of coming up with the right solutions should be the gauge whether students learn how to think. This is the kind of perspective we need so that we can solve our own problems.

Another framework that is being introduced is the School-based Management (SBM). SBM was introduced as an integrating framework for obtaining school-level project inputs and building school capacity for education planning and program implementation beginning in school year 2003-04. Schools participating in SBM were required to design a five-year School Improvement Plan (SIP) in partnership with parents and the community using data such as student achievement and students’ learning needs assessments, with the school principal or head teacher leading the process. Based on the SIP, schools developed an Annual Implementation Plan (AIP) at the beginning of the school year and a report card to be shared with the community at the end of the school year.

The SBM was designed to improve student outcomes through two main venues: by empowering the school community to identify education priorities and to allocate the school maintenance and operating budgets to those priorities (such as curriculum enrichment programs); and by enhancing transparency and accountability through the annual implementation plans and school report cards. However, the SBM program articulated no explicit assumptions regarding the timeframe within which improvements in student achievement were expected to take place. Systematic data on the level of uptake and implementation of the key features of the reforms are also not available.