Charter change and its effects on

the education system

Antonio L. Tinio
ACT Teachers Partylist
We stand united against current moves to amend the 1987
Constitution, especially those aimed at opening Philippine schools
to prospective 100% foreign ownership on the following grounds:

• Reverse the little progress that we have achieved You are forging upon it
away from neocolonialism and will restore what chains harder than the
diamond!
Jose Rizal in Chapter 7 of El Filibusterismo has
called as “cadenas más duras que el diamante”
(“chains harder than diamond”)
 Opening up Philippine schools to 100% foreign
ownership does not and will not resolve the
current education crisis which in our case is
caused by decades of:
• insufficient public funding for education (see Fig. 1 and
Fig. 2)
• low salaries for teachers (see Fig. 3)
Fig. 1 Mathematics performance and spending on education (PISA 2022)
• perennial backlogs in instructional materials (see Fig. 4)
SOURCE: OECD (2023)
• facilities (classrooms, libraries, barangay reading centers,
internet etc.), stunting and malnutrition among our
children, to name just a few perennial problems.

Fig. 2 Mean reading performance and cumulative spending on education per student, in
USD PPP (PISA 2018)
SOURCE: World Bank (2020)
 Fig. 3 Entry-level teachers’ monthly salary in OECD

SOURCE: OECD (2024)

Fig. 4 Summary of Successful Procurement of Textbooks (2012-2023) in the Philippines for Grade 1 to
Grade 10

SOURCE: EDCOM2 (2024)

Rather than open up
our schools to foreign
ownership,
the Philippine government should
be reminded that improving the
quality of Philippine education is a
state obligation.
Opening up Philippine education system
schools to 100% foreign ownership:
• further worsen the
commercialization of our
education system
• means surrendering our
education system to foreigners
who don’t know anything about
the root causes of our education
crisis
• may also force some small and
medium-sized private schools to
shut down
• Genuine global competitiveness
means that our students are able to
learn what typical students in other
countries learn and does not require
100% foreign ownership

• Ensuring that the education system is

responsive to our communities’ needs
and primarily meant to serve our own
national development
We can still engage in
internationalization – without
100% foreign ownership of
schools –
by engaging in mutually beneficial
academic linkages, faculty and
student exchanges, and through
studying abroad to focus on best
practices which we can adopt if
applicable to the Philippine
situation.
As Renato Constantino has emphasized in the classic
pamphlet Miseducation of the Filipino:

“(e)ducation must both be seen not as an

acquisition of information but as the
making of man so that he may function
most effectively and usefully within his
own society. Therefore, education
cannot be divorced from the society of a
definite country at a definite time...
As Renato Constantino has emphasized in the classic
pamphlet Miseducation of the Filipino:

...It is a fallacy to think that educational

goals should be the same everywhere and
that therefore what goes into the making of a
well-educated American is the same as what
should go into the making of the well-
educated Filipino. This would be true only if
the two societies were at the same political,
cultural, and economic level and had the
same political, cultural and economic goals.”
The framers of the 1987 Constitution were right to nurture the
Filipinization of the country’s education system and to set clear
limits on foreign ownership of schools in our country.
Hence, rather than use
precious public funds for
pointless and non-
exhaustive cha-cha
hearings,
Congress should utilize public
funds for urgent steps needed to
improve the quality of education.
 Furthermore, we should stand against similar moves to do away with
foreign ownership limitations in various sectors of the economy (such
as public utilities, advertising etc.) and also warn against the
possibility of dynasty-backed political cha-cha that could remove term
limits, destroy or weaken existing checks and balances, or even delete
the constitutional ban on political dynasties.
THANK YOU!