Policy Brief Senate Economic Planning Office I. Overview Revisiting the Cyber Education Project

Senate Economic Planning Office provides analysis and discussion on important socioeconomic issues as inputs to the work of Senators and Senate Officials. The SEPO Policy Brief is also available at www.senate.gov.ph. 1.1 The Cyber Education Project (CEP) envisions the use of state-of-the art technology to deliver educational services and resources to even the remotest and most underserved public elementary and secondary schools in the country. With funding from the Chinese government, the CEP will provide universal connectivity and content for the nation's public schools. 1.2 This ICT-based education strategy is included in an economic cooperation agreement between the Philippines and China signed in June 2006. The CEP is supposed to be carried out with technical assistance from Tsinghua University, China's premier technology university and one of the world's pioneers in distance education. 1.3 The DepEd set the school year 2008-2009 as the target date for the launch of the pilot shools and the remaining schools for the first phase of the CEP. However, allegations that the CEP is another anomalous transaction similar to the controversial $329-million national broadband network (NBN) project prompted the President to put on hold its implementation. Currently, the Ateneo IT Group and the Presidential Task Force on Education are studying further its economic viability. 1.4 The CEP aims to achieve standard high quality of education and bring about substantial improvements in students performance through technology. From 2001 to 2006, both the quantity and quality of education have miserably deteriorated. Key performance indicators such as the participation, cohort survival and completion rates for both elementary and secondary levels significantly declined during the aforementioned period. (See Table 1.) For instance, in elementary: participation rate declined by 5.69 percentage points from 90.1% in 2001 to 84.41% in 2006`; cohort survival rate also declined by 10.69 percentage points from 69.05% in 2001 to 58.36% in 2006; completion rate likewise dropped by about 10 percentage points during the same period. Meanwhile, dropout rate soared by 4.06 percentage points from 6.51% in 2001 to 10.57% in 2006. The indicators are worse in the secondary level. The country's basic education sector is in an alarming state. Performance indicators have worsened in recent years while the quality , as manifested by the appalling performance of Filipino students in international assessment tests, continue to deteriorate. Given the government's budget constraint, the question that then begs to be answered is: what is the best strategy to …