Philippines 2: Public School Visit

During my week in Manila, I visited two government schools also in the district of Mandaluyong. The trip was kindly facilitated by the Department of Education.   Below I include some photos and commentary from what we saw.

School number one was actually an elementary school, and we only went around briefly.  We arrived after lunch in what was a very active school break, with swarms of children playing around the halls and courtyard. They were very intrigued to see who the guests were, talking with their Principal.

School Entrance.

Elementary school - playground and classroom blocks

Classroom block - no running in the corridors!

A rather happy student, pleased with sliding down the bannisters and having his photo taken. 

District officer in charge of cluster of Mandaluyong public schools.  Kindly hosted us around the school tours.

The second school we saw was a Senior High school, and is I believe the flagship school within the District (it should be noted therefore that it may not be completely representative of what other urban state secondaries look like, for purposes of comparison to the private school).  We first met with the Principal and she then invited what I think must have been the entire female faculty to join us, as you can see from the photo below:

 

Yours truly with staff of Gonzales High School.  Principal is the lady immediately left of me.

When quizzed many of the staff had been teaching at the school for between 7-15 years.  All appeared very pleased with their roles and the progress of the children (but then they were all in front of their boss and conducting an official school tour, so I'd hardly expect them to say anything else.) 


The full name of the school is the rather lengthy Mataas na Paaralang Neptali A. Gonzales, and you can visit the school's official website here.  From what I could gather, the late Mr. Gonzales Senior was a politician representing the District in Congress, and he founded the original school using his own money.  His son, also now the current District Congressman, is still sponsoring the school and has recently organised and funded the construction of two new school blocks, adding 80 new classrooms to the facilities.  

Reminders of Messrs Gonzales Senior and Junior were all over the school - both in the golden statue greeting visitors in pride of place in the entrance courtyard, and in the political banners hanging from the school blocks. 

Students just outside the Gonzales school entrance, leaving school after a busy day.

University-esque facade that greets visitors upon entry.

 

Statue of Congressman Gonzales, Snr, founder of the school.

Dedication Plaque noting that the new Congressman Gonzales has organised the construction of the new school classrooms.

Campaign poster for current congressman hanging in school. 

As for the school's facilities themselves, we unfortunately only got to see the empty classrooms.  I counted desks in each classroom, and they had been standardised to 45 students to 1 teacher, lower class sizes than typical for the private school (and certainly for rural state schools).  There didn't appear to be any projectors or educational ICT equipment, but the new classrooms were clean and spacious. 

Grade 7 weekly timetable - school day formally starts at 7am and finishes at 1.30pm. 

One unexpected feature that the Congressman had donated to the school was what was called a 'Practice House.'  It was essentially a stand-alone bungalow domestic residence, with bathroom, living room, and kitchen, in which, so we were told, students could practice 'home economics' and hospitality/domestic cleaning. 

On the one hand this is quite a practical policy to equip students with vocational skills that are clearly in demand out there in the real world.  On the other hand, I worry that encouraging students immediately into professional domestic service is perhaps reinforcing the stereotypical role that foreigners often expect Filipinos to pursue.  It may not be raising aspiration in quite the best way, but we didn't really have much of a chance to interrogate exactly how the Practice House was used, which students got to use it, and how it integrated into the standard curriculum. 

The outside of the Practice House

 

The Principal shows us inside the Practice House.

Another group photo outside the Practice House.

 The school had decent sports facilities, and was clearly relatively well-resourced.  We couldn't get much detail about the student attainment levels or extra-curricular activities, but were reassured that relative to other government schools student performance was strong. 

Gonzales Sports rink for basketball, football, and athletics.

In terms of infrastructure the Gonzales school came across as marginally better than the JRU private school.  The comparison is interesting though, because clearly Gonzales receives considerable formal and informal funding subsidies to help it expand and maintain its good quality infrastructure - I wonder how sustainable those levels of subsidies will be right across the state system, particularly in the poorer rural Provinces?  Much more detailed data will be needed about the inspection reports on each school, the assessment of student performance, parental satisfaction levels, alumni tracking, College and University acceptance rates, and indeed the actual nature of the curriculum and student competencies mastered.  It turns out that not much standardised testing is actually done in the Philippines, and therefore making precisely this quality comparison between private schools and public schools is difficult.  I think the last comparable student performance data available that takes in both types of schools is the 2002 PISA test, but I will have to dig into this.