Fully Functional Instructional Materials Council?

The Instructional Materials Council Secretariat (IMCS) of the Department of Education has this (sole) official mandate: "Provide technical assistance to the Instructional Materials Council in the formulation and adoption of policies and guidelines, in the development, evaluation, and procurement of textbooks and other instructional materials."
The IMCS is the Secretariat of a more important body, the Council, which is supposed to make final decisions on textbook procurement & to oversee the evaluation of instructional materials for all public elementary & secondary schools.
Besides the DepEd Secretary & the 2 directors of the bureaus of elementary & secondary education, who are the members of the Instructional Materials Council? Does the membership include recognized textbook specialists from the private school system? Perhaps the Council should also include a competent representative of a relevant citizens organization or civil society group.

How often does the current Council meet as a whole body? Are there official records of its meetings? When was its last meeting? Is its Secretariat pro-active enough in ensuring that the Council is fully functional & has complete membership that holds meetings periodically or as often as necessary?
On a related matter, the IMCS, the Secretariat of the current Council, seems to be on the verge of persuading some high officials of the DepEd to ask Congress to return to the DepEd the responsibility of publishing the textbooks for the public school system.
Should the tasks of writing and producing the textbooks be returned to the DepEd and taken away from the textbook publishers of the book industry, when the DepEd through the IMCS has not yet been able to establish a solid track record in implementing an efficient and effective evaluation system for the textbooks available for procurement?
What makes the IMCS so sure it can do better in the whole publication process (with research, writing, evaluating, editing, and designing activities)?
The IMCS would point to the past, especially the era of the Marcos dictatorship, when the Department of Education produced its own textbooks through an Instructional Materials Development Corporation. Can the IMCS produce enough studies from independent & competent researchers that have compared textbooks before & after the 1995 privatization of DepEd textbook procurement, & which show that the DepEd-published textbooks were clearly superior?

For public school textbook procurement reform, I reiterate my proposal to remove the actual evaluation of the textbooks from the responsibilities of the Secretariat of an incomplete Instructional Materials Council. The IMCS does not have enough experts of its own, but usually taps many external experts from public and private academic institutions.
Also, given the budgetary constraints of the IMCS, it gives relatively low compensation to the external experts, and thus the IMCS neither attracts the best experts nor provides enough incentives for the experts to exert their best efforts in the evaluation process.

It would be more efficient to decentralize textbook evaluation by accrediting appropriate departments of reputable academic institutions and Centers of Excellence like the UP National Institute of Science and Mathematics Education, the Ateneo de Manila Department of English, the UST Department of Science, the De la Salle University Department of Filipino, etc. to evaluate the textbooks.

The role of a reconstituted & fully functional Instructional Materials Council then would be to accredit those institutions and centers, which can charge reasonably competitive evaluation fees from the textbook publishers. In this way, the DepEd can do away with its complex 5-step evaluation system, which unfortunately has allowed some low quality textbooks to squeak through owing to the loopholes created yet obscured by the sheer complexity of the system.

In this scheme, the Instructional Materials Council would consider for DepEd procurement only those series of textbooks that obtained seals of approval from the accredited institutions and centers, and it should require that the names of the approving institutions and centers be prominently displayed on the textbooks themselves. The risk of ruining their reputations would push the institutions and centers to make sure that they do a good job.
The Council would do occasional random checking in which, if it found a low quality textbook among those that an accredited institution had approved, it would pursue an established process to remove accreditation from the negligent institution.

In this scheme, the competition in the public school textbook procurement system among publishers whose textbooks obtained seals of approval would be on the basis of price and some technical requirements and no longer on textbook quality.

This proposal is consistent with National Book Policy #5, which provides that “the State shall support an efficient book utilization program for educational institutions.” Also, Implementing Policy 5.5 states: “the Department of Education shall initiate measures to decentralize evaluation of textbooks, references and other instructional materials particularly those which are locally developed and/or intended for specific geographic areas or cultural communities.”

The DepEd's over-centralized and complex system of large-scale textbook procurement strongly attracts attempts at grand corruption that involves some textbook publishers and those DepEd bureaucrats who discover the loopholes created and obscured by the complexity of the system.
(Comments are welcome.)

Plus 2 Years of Quality Education?

The National Book Development Board can help the Department of Education in prescribing the guidelines in preparing the minimum learning competencies and other specifications for the public school textbooks to be used for the additional 2 years of the basic education cycle announced by Pres. Noynoy Aquino and Sec. Armin Luistro, FSC.
If one additional year would mean restoring Grade 7 to elementary education, then I personally propose that the DepEd with the NBDB begin by looking at the learning competencies targeted by reputable private schools that do have Grade 7.
I do hope that the effort that the DepEd will exert to formulate the curiculum and to mobilize the resources for the additional 2 years will be at least equally matched by the effort to ensure that "every child is a reader by Grade 3" and to raise the mean percentage score of the National Achievement Test (NAT) of prospective graduates of Grade 6 to at least 75%.
As of now, many public school children beyond Grade 3 still cannot read and understand a simple paragraph. The NAT mean percentage score, which was 55% when the NAT started in 2002, has improved through the years to 66.33% in 2009, but this is still below the minimum for what can qualify for "mastery" of the targeted learning competencies which is 75%.
Without ensuring the delivery of quality education especially in the current 6 years of elementary education, the additional 2 years would likely result in the lengthening and reinforcement of mediocrity which would mean a great deal of waste of public resources and taxes.

Antonio Calipjo Go, "Sick Books Crusader"

Antonio Calipjo Go has belatedly admitted to the public that he neither has written a textbook nor has finished college.  Years ago, some reputable educators and journalists asked about his specific expertise, but he always gave an evasive answer.  After his overdue admission, he offers the public a sob story as to the reason for his inability to finish college nearly forty years ago: family poverty and the premature death of his father.  Should we shed tears for such a palusot?

In his expensive paid advertisements in which he tried to show the allegedly many errors in English, Filipino, Science and Social Studies textbooks used in public and private schools, Calipjo Go wanted us to believe that he had a monopoly of textbook expertise in several learning areas.  He angrily rejects the findings of several experts, such as those from the University of Sto. Tomas Department of Science, who have carefully examined and disputed the "errors" he found in textbooks he targeted.

Calipjo Go appears to be a publicity-hungry and self-anointed super-expert whose commentaries are combinations of shameless self-glorification and the ravings and rantings of a lonely aging man who has not outgrown his unhappy youth.  Imagine his arrogance in declaring in a piece he wrote for the Philippine Daily Inquirer (PDI): "I am the only person who actually tried to do something about the problem of error-riddled textbooks."

Calipjo Go likes to imagine himself persecuted by established academic institutions and recognized experts who disagree with his findings.  The PDI likes to lionize him especially after he put out several expensive advertisements.  Also, the PDI does not apply strict journalistic standards in verifying before publishing his allegations and stories.

In his 21 June 2010 commentary at the PDI, Calipjo Go attacked the book, "Biology," developed for secondary school students by the University of the Philippines National Institute of Science and Mathematics Education Development (UP NISMED).

Below is a reproduction of the response of UP NISMED to Go:

We read with interest (and not a small amount of frustration) Mr. Antonio Calipjo Go’s commentary on “Biology,” a textbook written by UP NISMED for high school students. He thinks the book is full of “idiocies and inanities, fallacies and errors.” He has a big axe to grind. Allow us to counter this unwarranted hatchet job.

Mr. Go thinks the title of the book is unimaginative. (We think it’s concise.) But he takes issue with the graphic spiny anteater, preferring the term echidna, which does not evoke any vivid image of the animal. He wants monotremes in place of the descriptive egg-laying mammals. He would rather we used marsupials, instead of the suggestive pouched mammals. The study of biology is at times made unnecessarily difficult by the use of words that sound foreign to learners. As UP NISMED appreciates this difficulty, it has put more value on the use of terms that help clarify concepts and are easily understood by the students. But we learned our lesson. Next time we will use terms that impede imagination.

Mr. Go thinks 358 pages are not enough to tackle a “very complex subject.” He prefers the much longer book by Prentice-Hall which he says has 923 pages. (We wonder whether it is possible to teach all the content written in such a book in a single academic year.) To be sure, Mr. Go knows that DepEd prescribes a limited number of pages per textbook. Yet, despite this limitation, all the learning competencies for Second Year Biology have been covered in the book.

Mr. Go thinks that the question, When did humans evolve?, is stupid. In fact, he cannot think of a question more stupid than this. To explain his point, he says that evolution is a very slow process of change occurring over a very long period of time. Apparently, Mr. Go wants to restrict the use of ‘When?’ to mean ‘At what time?’ He thinks it is wrong to use ‘When?’ to mean ‘Over what period?’ Using his rule, no one would be able to ask: When did the dinosaurs rule the Earth? When did the last Ice Age occur? When were the Himalayas formed?

Mr. Go thinks that the caption, Tools used during early times. Are these tools familiar to you? Where are they currently used?, is also stupid. However, he does not explain why. Perhaps he thinks that the writer was expecting the readers to be familiar with the tools or that the tools were being used at present. Just the opposite, the intention is to underscore the readers’ unfamiliarity with the tools and the fact that they are not used anymore. This is to emphasize the level of technology in olden times, that tools at the time were little more than stones with sharp edges and pointed tips.

Mr. Go asks if it is correct to teach, at the basic level, that Bone consists of living cells found in cavities and are surrounded by a hard, nonliving substance. Or, that Xylem cells are usually dead cells with thickened walls while phloem consists of living cells. He asks, “How can cells or substances be considered dead or nonliving when they are embedded deep within a living organism, and without which that organism cannot, in fact, live or survive?” Apparently, Mr. Go’s single criterion for considering a cell as living is the fact that it is embedded within a living organism. This is absolutely wrong. UP NISMED’s definitions for bone and xylem are not incorrect.

We request readers who come across commentaries such as this to be wary and critical. Do your own research and find out if what is being claimed as erroneous truly is erroneous, or merely the misinterpretation of someone who may not be competent in the field that he or she is criticizing. The greater “moral battle” is that which must be waged against those who masquerade as experts and peddle misinformation in the guise of professing love for country.

Truly, a little learning is a dangerous thing.