The Problem with the Philippine Education System is That It Inadvertently Tends to Make One Stroke One's Ego

What happens is that the traditional Philippine education system focuses too much on monuments of fame rather than learning milestones. It reminds me of the incident where Rep. Raoul Abellar Manuel stressed out he was a cum laude, and that he's not stupid. I feel this is a microcosm of a much bigger problem that happens with the education system. I'm not going to deny that going to the University of the Philippines and graduating summa cum laude isn't an easy feat. However, I wrote an article on what's the use of being a summa cum laude when one opposes badly needed reforms. It's because whether we want to admit it or not, schools focus too much on the ability to memorize without also focusing on the ability to understand. Memory is also the least reliable tool. 

It would be time to continuously attack the problems of the education system. I felt shamed back then because students were often told, "Your grades will determine your future!" In college, I took myself more seriously without thinking of having to be in the honor ranks. I forced myself to be in the honor rank, only to damage my confidence in the process. However, some people I knew had been "janitorial" had one day become the principal of an excellent school, had made enough money, etc. It's not because they did bad in school but had turned a new leaf, in their habits. Some people simply regret wasting their teenage years and deciding to become productive adults. Some people even graduate summa cumlaude but are idiots with real life. There are times I justify my mistakes by saying, "But I'm not a cum laude!" I get backfired and told, "There are many cum laudes who haven't done anything with their life!" However, I believe such people may want to recall why they hated school. 

What should be shaking is the statement, "You can be a cum laude, a consistent honor student, get a doctorate, graduate from a hard-to-enter school, and still be an idiot." It's because idiot or foolishness isn't intellectual. Stupidity should be considered an intellectual issue. Stupid people can still learn, but they have to struggle harder than the intelligent ones. Meanwhile, a fool lacks common sense with real-life issues. Whether we want to admit it or not--some people get drunk with past successes. Some companies today suffer such as Adobe (a big thing in the past) is now having trouble with the US government. Some people can have plenty of medals from elementary, middle school, high school, college, get a master's degree, PhD, etc. However, they're still idiots because they refuse to think outside the box. One can't say he or she isn't an idiot based on academic credentials.

If we need to think about the education system--the problem lies with how traditional grading tends to emphasize more on monuments of fame rather than the true purpose of school. The true purpose of school is to educate. Education is meant to be a cooperation--not a competition within the classroom. The success of one student is good. However, we want to make everyone successful. There's a need for cooperation. However, the grading system inevitably makes students compete with each other. I could remember hating certain people in school (under K+10) because they were better than I am. I even remembered shouting I would murder someone for simply being more intelligent than I am. At fourth year of high school, I remember throwing tantrums during math classes, because so and so was better than I am. It irritated me when someone could compute faster than I could. However, the same person wasn't as good at composition as I was. Looking back, that incident can show why a one-size-fits-all approach is a failure. I still remember the guy good in mathematics would try to defuse our childish fight by reminding me, "We've got our strengths and weaknesses." However, being teenagers, neither me or that guy knew may have had a growth mindset! I used to hate mathematics in school. However, I enjoy exploring mathematics in daily life. 

The Harvard Graduate School of Education shows this problem with the grading system:

What’s the Problem?

The confusion starts with consistency, as in, there is none. At most schools, there’s no consistency about what’s included in a grade or what’s left out, even among teachers teaching the same subject in the same school to students in the same grade at the same level. This creates what is often called “grade fog” — we’re not sure what the grade means because we’re asking that A or that C+ to communicate too much disparate information.

“It’s radically inconsistent from teacher to teacher,” says A.J. Stitch, Ed.M.’12, the founding principal of the Greater Dayton School, a private school in Ohio for kids from low-income backgrounds that doesn’t use traditional grades. At public schools where he has worked in the past, he says “most teachers had different approaches to weighting homework, classwork, quizzes, and tests.”

For example, he says, “a student may demonstrate mastery of content on a test, quiz, and classwork, yet still fails a course because the teacher decides to weigh homework 40%, and the student, for one reason or another, struggles in that regard. Obviously, that’s inequitable, and it illustrates the variation of weighted grade scales and how it impacts a student’s success or failure, regardless of whether they mastered the standards taught in the course. Sadly, I made this mistake myself as a young teacher, and as a principal I’ve seen too many teachers make this mistake, too.”

Jason Merrill, the principal of Melrose High School, where my son currently goes to school, says this is one of the biggest reasons they started looking at their teaching and learning practices, and why they applied to become one of five schools in the multi-year Rethinking Grading Pilot program sponsored by the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

“Your son has eight teachers right now that all have their own way to grade. Completely their own,” he says. “The average kid often gives up trying to figure it out. Some teachers count homework, some teachers don’t. Some teachers grade homework, some teachers grade it as completion. Some teachers count large tests for a lot more than others. What we want to do is not have 85 different ways to respond to a fire alarm.”

Feldman says we also don’t want to include non-academics in grades — things like messy binders and not coming to class with a pencil, or the one that is commonly factored in: late work.

“A student who writes an A-quality essay but hands it in late gets her writing downgraded to a B, and the student who writes a B-quality essay turned in by the deadline receives a B. There’s nothing to distinguish those two B grades, although those students have very different levels of content mastery,” he says.

Traditional grading also invites biases, he says, especially around behavior. “When we include a student’s behavior in a grade, we’re imposing on all of our students a narrow idea of what a ‘successful’ student is,” Feldman says, and “you start to misrepresent and warp the accuracy.” For example, a student who participates in discussions and always brings their pencil to class earns five points, but they get a C on the test. Adding the five behavior points lifts that C test grade to something in the low B range. Although students and parents are happy the grade is a B and that the student’s all-important GPA remains intact, this warping can create longer term problems.

“You’re telling the student that they’re at a B level in content, and they’re actually at a C,” Feldman says. “They don’t think there’s a problem, the counselors don’t think there’s a problem, and the student goes to the next grade level and gets crushed by the content. They had no idea that they weren’t prepared for the rigor of that class because they kept getting the message that they were getting B’s.”

It can be especially confusing for parents, says Christopher Beaver, one of the assistant principals at Melrose High. “I knew what my own kids could do skill-based wise, but if I’m a parent and I don’t know what my kids can do because the teachers haven’t laid that out for me on a report card, then I can’t look at a report card and say, ‘See that. My kid is proficient at this skill or my kid is proficient at that skill,’” he says. “I’m going to focus on something like the GPA because that’s all I have. And I’m going to assume, if my kid has a high GPA, that my kid’s skillset is at a proficient level. But that is not always the case.”

As a parent, I was confused earlier this year when my son’s overall grade in a class was low, even though he seemed to get the content. We looked online at the grading portal the district uses and sure enough, he had Bs and As. But then there was that one grade: a 44 on a test he didn’t have enough time to finish. That one low test score brought the whole grade down because of another impossible part of how we grade: averaging.

“We have this ridiculous system of averaging things out,” Pope says, “which doesn’t make any sense because the goal is to get students to learn material. Same with the case against zero, right? Why would you give a kid a zero? A zero is worse than an F.”

The “case against zero” idea is that when using a 0-to-100-point scale in grading, a student should never receive a zero, even if they didn’t turn in an assignment. Sounds odd, given that a zero for not turning in work is how we’ve long operated, but as author Doug Reeves wrote in 2004 in “The Case Against the Zero” in Phi Delta Kappan, “assigning a zero is disproportionate punishment.”

Why? Because mathematically, with a 0-to-100 scale, failing a class is more likely than passing a class. Think about it. Each letter grade is 10 points — an A is 90-100, a B is 80- 89, a C is 70-79, and a D is 60-69 — but the scale’s one failing grade, an F, spans not 10 points, but 60 (0 to 59). The result is that a zero disproportionally pulls down an average and makes it that much harder to pull a grade up significantly. A student with two 85s, for example, is averaging a B. If that student gets a 0 on one assignment, their average drops to 56, an F. Even if the student gets 85s on the next two assignments, their average still only jumps to a 68. So, four Bs and one zero means the student’s averaged overall grade is a D+.

This averaging especially penalizes students who start out a semester slower with lower grades. Even if they figure out the material and fully master content later, averaging won’t necessarily reflect what they truly know. In his book, Feldman gives an example of a student who, coming into ninth grade, had never learned to write a persuasive essay. The ninth-grade teacher gives an assignment early in September, revealing this student’s writing inexperience.

“The essay gets a D-. But it’s early in September, and you, as the teacher, provide instruction and guided practice with feedback,” Feldman writes. The student’s writing improves, and their grade goes up with each new assignment. The student eventually learns how to write an amazing persuasive essay. They are doing A work. However, when the grades are averaged, that early D- drags down the overall grade and though the student mastered persuasive writing, their A drops to a B-.

The last statement reminds me of how that classmate I used to fight with (because he was better in math) once wrote a simplistic essay that got a high grade. It wasn't elaborate and it got direct to the point. The person still took a math-intensive course anyway, because that's where the person was good at. I took a totally different path than him. Most of those fights back then are rooted on teenage immaturity. If I blame anything that caused the fire to worsen back then, it was because the school system hardly accounts for individual differences. That may also explain why hatred for math is that rampant. If schools started caring more about how we learn math than just a grade for math, I don't think getting it wrong would be such a big deal. I remembered shouting, "I hate mathematics!" so loud after I got it wrong for the nth time. A good teacher couldn't help that much, as long as grades were the focus, not the learning!

It's probably why some summa cum laudes from hard-to-enter schools oppose economic liberalization. They would say, "If we allow foreign schools to enter the Philippines, can Filipinos afford it?" That's the argument of someone I ran into on Facebook. I'll call the person F*gm*r*n Benz because of his idiotic arguments. I believe it's a fake account, probably run by the person I call Porky Madugo. Back to the topic, these people don't even understand that if more open FDI was allowed, there will be more jobs for Filipinos. Whoever says FDIs will just employ the people from their country and leave nothing more the economy, are dreaming. I don't need a PhD in economics at the Ateneo De Manila or the University of the Philippines to understand that! MNCs will hire the people they can immediately hire, buy the resources they can immediately buy, etc. if they expect to start business. Why would Foodpanda have to wait for Germans to drive the motorcycles when they can fire Filipinos? Also, if there are more jobs from both Filipino businesses and MNCs--all these businesses will increase the demand for labor (read here). The supply of labor will be shortened (because more people will get employed), therefore the cost of labor will also increase. That means more people can even afford to go to international schools. It's because if there are more schools, the cost of education will go lower thanks to higher supply and lower demand. Again, that F*gm*r*on just tries to laugh it off by saying, "Muh supply and demand!" I bet all Porky does is eat all day. I bet it's not going to be fun discussing economics with an overeater (read here).

It would be all about stroking one's ego. It would be all about bragging that one was a consistent honor student from nursery to doctorate. It may be because people are just self-serving, as evidenced by their actions! Please, people are subject to decline and nothing is fresh forever! Open the graves of the great scholars and you'll see nothing but skeletons. In my case, it's good that I know some consistent honor students who refuse to stroke their egos. That's why I'm going to keep up the fight because those who refuse to learn from history, are doomed to repeat it.