Trickle down of policy

Pope Francis has been very vocal about the fallacy of trickle-down theories in economics. The theoretical movement of wealth from top to bottom has clearly not happened in the Philippines (nor anywhere else), where the rich have become richer and the poor have remained poor.

There is another trickle-down phenomenon that has also been problematic in the Philippines. This is the trickle down of policy. Policies laid down at the top are often not implemented or not even understood at the bottom.

A simple example is that of our current president. There is little doubt that he is honest and sincerely abhors corruption, but his anti-corruption policy has not trickled down to the lower rungs of government. You still need to bribe most government bureaucrats to pay attention to you, whether you are establishing a business or getting a contract or adding a room to your house. If you do not have personal experience of a rank-and-file government employee asking for money, just ask your neighbor. More likely than not, your neighbor has had to shell out cash for the simplest government permits. (I am talking about now, not during the previous administration.)

Another example is the educational system. There is little doubt that the heads of our education agencies have the best interests of our youth in their hearts, but if you deal with a typical regional education office, you will see that misinformation and unauthorized policies still hold sway.

Allow me to give a personal example. I have seen the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) from both sides.

For several years, I headed two CHED Technical Panels, organized Quality Assurance Teams of the National Capital Region, and joined teams recommending university or autonomous status of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) around the country. I even once chaired CHED’s Board of Advisers.

Now, as president of a small college with two branches, I deal with the regional offices of CHED. Instead of deciding whether an HEI should get a permit to open a new course, I now have to ask for permits for new courses that I want to offer.

Without going into particulars, I can say that I am amazed at how a few (not all, since I have not dealt with all of them) regional directors seem to be not literate enough to read CHED Memorandum Orders (CMOs) properly. Programs that, as head of a Quality Assurance Team, I would have no hesitation recommending for approval cannot get past a regional office.

Last week, I analyzed a typical CMO to show that the CHED Commissioners, who sign CMOs, are very much aware of academic freedom. They have carefully crafted CMOs so that there is no violation of the constitutional provision giving HEIs what the Supreme Court has specified as the right to determine “(1) who may teach; (2) who may be taught; (3) how lessons shall be taught; and (4) who may be admitted to study.”

Sadly, some (again, I will not say all) lower-level CHED officials insist that all schools, for example, should use a particular outcomes-based pedagogy. This misunderstanding stems from a perception, most likely caused by CHED’s “Handbook on Typology, Outcomes-based Education, and Institutional Sustainability Assessment,” that outcomes-based education (OBE) is the only correct way of teaching college students, even if the Handbook uses the words “sample” and “recommended” instead of “required.”

What some lower-level CHED officials have apparently not read is Section 3.2.2. of CMO No. 46, s. 2012 (“Policy-Standard to Enhance Quality Assurance in Philippine Higher Education through an Outcomes-based and Typology-based QA”), which says, very clearly, that “Cognizant of the wide range of disciplinal and multidisciplinary orientations and practices across branches of knowledge – nationally and internationally – CHED is NOT subscribing to a one-size-fits-all model of outcomes-based education.” The capital letters in NOT are not mine, but are in the CMO itself; in fact, the letters are in bold print in the CMO, the better to tell everyone that there is no one way of teaching effectively nor even one way of defining OBE. (“Debate about outcome-based education reveals widespread confusion about terminology and concepts,” says the American Education Commission of the States.)

We can see the effort made by the CHED Commissioners not to violate the constitutionally-guaranteed freedom of HEIs to determine for themselves “how lessons shall be taught.” I can appreciate the tightrope that the CHED Commissioners have to walk: they cannot violate the Constitution, but on the other hand, they have to insist on some kind of quality assurance or minimum standards.

Monitoring HEIs is a hard job, but it becomes harder when lower-level bureaucrats do not follow what higher-level officials are telling them to do.

There is really no reason for the current ugly controversy over OBE; it was created by the inability of lower-level CHED officials, as well as many HEI administrators, to read all CMOs in the context of the Constitution.