Did Congress act wisely in 1994 when it decided to break up the Department of Education, Culture and Sports into three entities, namely, the Department of Education, Commission on Higher Education and Technical Education and Skills Development Authority? Is the Philippine education system stronger and better as a result of a structural change that was meant to be ameliorative?
These questions have repeatedly been asked over the last two decades. They were asked again in the aftermath of the death a few weeks ago of former Senator Leticia Ramos-Shahani, the younger sister of former President Fidel Ramos. Senator Shahani was the chairman of the Senate committee on education at the time the DECS-restructuring bill was filed in and deliberated upon by the upper chamber of Congress.
The secretary of Education, Culture and Sports was Dr. Armand Fabella, president of Jose Rizal College (now a university), who had been the chief economic adviser of President Diosdado Macapagal. Armand Fabella was only too happy to accept President Ramos’s offer of the education portfolio; although an economist by training and experience, his close involvement with Fabella-founded JRC imbued him with a desire to help Philippine education directly. There was as much educator’s blood running through Armand Fabella’s veins as economist’s blood.
Senator Shahani’s and Secretary Fabella’s paths had of course crossed numerous times previously. Not only were the Ramoses and Fabellas prominent members of Manila society, but as the sibling of President Ramos he was bound to come into contact with her often, both officially and socially. But it was in relation to Armand Fabella’s being secretary of Education that the paths of the senator and the secretary crossed momentously.
People who were close to Armand Fabella know that his swift, I-don’t-have-to-put-up-with-this decision to resign from his position was precipitated in large measure by his disappointment over the endorsement by the Senate committee on education of the DECS-restructuring bill filed by Senator Edgardo Angara. Fabella must have felt that presidential sister Leticia Shahani, as committee chairman, could and should have done more to prevent Senate approval of a piece of legislation that would lead to DECS’s dismemberment.
That Armand Fabella would resign if the Angara bill became law was no secret to many people within and outside DECS. President Ramos himself knew it. “Well ahead, [Fabella] was telling me already that [he was going to resign] because breaking up the Department of Education into three agencies was coming,” the nation’s 12th Chief Executive told Roel Landingin, the author of a biography of Armand Fabella, two decades after the event.” He told me, ‘Mr. President, [the new law] is coming and I want you to know that I am intending to resign. Not because I consider it a demotion but because with three heads of the education system it will be harder to go through with the reforms that you want. I told him, please don’t leave ….. but he was no longer keen on the job.”
Landingin went on to write: “[Fabella] realized the need to oversee the various educational levels – elementary, high school and college – as parts of an integrated system [and that] the regulation of basic education and tertiary education must be linked and coordinated, not delinked and separated from each other.”
Under the Angara bill the Commission on Higher Education would be a totally autonomous body and the secretary of Education would not be a member of the Commission or of the state-owned universities and colleges providing teacher training. The result would be a cutting of the link between the State and private institutions providing teacher training and the biggest employer of teachers, viz., the Department of Education.
In a letter to Senator Shahani, Fabella argued that the Secretary of Education should be the head of CHED “so that education can continue to speak with one voice.”
But all of Fabella’s arguments went unheeded. The Angara bill was approved by Congress and the new law was sent up to President Ramos, who signed it. “Fabella promptly resigned from the Ramos Cabinet,” Landingin wrote.
This brings me back to the two questions that I posed at the beginning of this column. Did Congress act wisely in 1994 when it decided to break up DECS into three independent entities? And is the Philippine education stronger and better as a result of that Congressional decision?
Like Armand Fabella, I believed that the bill slicing up the Philippine education system into three parts was an unwise measure. Indeed, I was shocked when I first heard of Senator Edgardo Angara’s plan to introduce a bill that would place responsibility for tertiary education and technical/vocational education in two new institutions. Apart from establishing an additional layer of bureaucracy, the creation of two new institutions seemed to me like a case of converting a single problem into three problems. If the plaint was about inadequate attention to tertiary education and technical/vocational education, could that not have been addressed within the then-existing educational structure? Armand Fabella thought that it could, and I fully agreed with him.
As for the second question, I believe it is fair to say that whatever advances have been achieved by this country’s educational system have been the result of private-sector initiatives. Since the start of its operations, the Filipino people have been waiting for a CHED grand design or master plan for Philippine tertiary education. Twenty-three years later they’re still waiting. Given the atmosphere of unimaginativeness and non-dynamism that has pervaded CHED from the outset, it will probably be a very long wait.
E-mail: rudyromero777@yahoo.com