Corruption in the education sector

While everyone is preoccupied with reports about the shameful extent of corruption in the public works and highways sector, only a few have paid attention to the corruption that has been seeping into the hallowed halls of educational institutions.

Corruption in the education sector has long been regarded as a reason for our country’s poor educational outcomes.

Educational institutions are considered the core of our social foundation as a nation. Yet, this foundation has been shaken many times, not only in the present but also in the past. All those who have been cited or implicated in corruption cases, while they sat as officials of the Department of Education (DepEd), have never been indicted or held accountable for their anomalous practices.

Many poorly constructed school buildings have collapsed during earthquakes. Such buildings showed substandard materials, like metal bars that were below the required specifications. Some school buildings were constructed with concrete that was not fortified with iron bars.

In October 2019, strong earthquakes rocked the province of North Cotabato, causing the collapse of school buildings in Kidapawan City, Makilala, Tulunan, and M’lang. In Makilala town, one school building was totally damaged, and it revealed evidence of corruption in the construction materials. There were no iron bars that held the concrete hollow blocks for the school building’s walls. After the earthquakes, nothing was left of the building, except the shreds of concrete, sans any iron bars to hold the hollow blocks together.

Unfortunately, no investigations were conducted after the reported damage. The provincial governor then, Nancy Catamco, held a meeting with the members of the school board to ensure that the next set of classrooms to be built would be “earthquake resilient.” For this to happen, she ordered the members of the board to ask for more funding from their congressmen and congresswomen to construct such “earthquake resilient classrooms.” (See PNA report by Edwin Fernandez, 2/21/20).

From 2016 to 2017, after my retirement as an academic at a state university in my home city in General Santos, I was engaged as a gender and inclusive education specialist for a foreign-funded program in Muslim Mindanao. The region was then called the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao. I led a team of elementary teachers in doing qualitative research to understand the situation of Muslim Mindanao-based teachers and why the performance of many school children in the region remained very low, especially in reading, mathematics, and science subjects.

One trainee approached me and asked me what to do to complete her reentry plan after she received a one-year scholarship grant given by the Australian government.

But I was surprised to hear her answer: “But Ma’am, I do not have a school for which I can make a reentry plan!” She was “employed” in a school that was nonexistent and got the scholarship through a local DepEd official—her uncle. At that time, the regulatory school identification system was not yet in place.

If there are ghost flood control projects, there were also “ghost schools” in many parts of Muslim Mindanao back then. I am no longer able to track whether this phenomenon still exists, as I have moved on to other social development projects in the region. Along with these “invisible” schools were also “ghost teachers” and “ghost students.”

In higher education, I also observed different forms of corrupt practices among both teachers (or professors) and university officials. I wrote about this earlier in several pieces for this column, starting with the “Greed in the academe” article (2/11/19).

But one practice of a few professors in higher education that I did not include in the 2019 article was about one professor who required her students to contribute P5,000 to “publish their research paper” in a journal. Some students of this professor were also my students back then (2015, before my retirement) and asked me how much I paid for getting an article published in peer-reviewed journals. They were surprised to learn that I have published several research-based articles in international peer-reviewed journals without paying for their publication. Then they revealed that one of their science professors required them to contribute some money for publishing an article based on their research. In exchange, they were assured of passing one of their required science courses. Upon publication of their article, it was their professor who claimed full authorship while the students who did the research and wrote the article were just acknowledged to have contributed as “research assistants” of their professor.

(To be continued next week.)