A party-list lawmaker on Saturday assailed the government for failing to curb the worsening out-of-school and dropout rates, with 4.8 million children staying idle, working in the farm or begging in the streets in 2016.
ACT Teachers party-list France Castro said the dropout rate, representing an 11-percent increase in five years, comes in the wake of government’s full support for the voucher program of the Department of Education and the Conditional Cash Transfer doleout scheme to encourage school attendance.
Citing the latest participation rates from DepEd, Castro said elementary school-age children who are not in school more than tripled from around 431,000 in 2011 to 1.4 million in 2015.
"The number of high school-age youth not enrolled from first to fourth years decreased but remains high at 3.4 million in 2015," Castro said.
"Moreover, the completion rate for high school declined during the same period, with 1.9 million, or more than a fourth of the enrollees, dropping out in the middle of the school year," she added.
Non-completion in elementary school was halved but about 2.3 million still left before graduation, indicating that poverty may have compelled the children to abandon school.
Castro also noted the wide gaps between elementary and high school enrollments (91.05 percent and 68.15 percent in 2015, respectively) indicate that a significant number of those in elementary do not go on and finish high school.
While nine out of 10 elementary school-age children are enrolled in elementary, enrollment in high school dropped to only around seven out of 10, Castro said.
“We attribute low enrolment and high drop-out to the alarming shortage of public schools, especially high schools, and the insufficient budget for their maintenance and operations,” Castro claimed.
“With 36,492 public elementary schools and only 7,677 high schools, children in four to five elementary schools will have to cram themselves into a single high school. This means classrooms bursting to capacity, worsening learning and teaching conditions, and eventually compelling students to drop out," Castro said.
Castro added that while almost all barangays in the country have at least one elementary school, high schools are found mainly in urban areas and population centers only, with the ratio still at one high school for every five barangays.
“Students in rural areas take the worst hit. Transportation costs and long travel—hazardous in many cases—to the nearest high schools contribute to students being discouraged to continue their education. That’s why we see Grade 6 completers not enrolling in or dropping out of high school,” Castro said.
“The only way to bring more students to school is for government to reverse its habit of underfunding public education, which will enable government to build and maintain more public schools, especially junior and senior high schools,” she said. “These dismal enrollment and dropout statistics should be enough to push the Duterte administration to pour more direct investments into public schools.”