Public school textbook ‘riddled with errors’
INSIDE PCIJ by Avigail Olarte on 1/24/07

When school opens this year, nearly a million error-riddled textbooks will yet again be supplied to public schools nationwide.
This was revealed by Antonio Go, the educator who blew the whistle on errors found in a History textbook two years ago, in yesterday’s Senate hearing on the “textbook scam.” Go, the academic supervisor of the Marian School of Quezon City, said the newly approved public school textbook on Social Studies, Ang Bagong Pilipino, has “more than 100 errors.”
“Why had this been allowed to happen?” said Go, who has been reviewing “defective textbooks” for 10 years now. “This is the biggest error, teaching children things that are wrong.”
Department of Education (DepEd) officials who attended the inquiry said they will look into the errors.
One of the factual errors pointed out by Go was the complete name of the weather bureau PAGASA spelled as Philippine Atmospheric, Geographical and Astronomical Administration. PAGASA stands for Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration.
Another error is the word “sangko,” defined in the book as the term for the third eldest female sibling, when it should be male. The book also calls the body of water “look” (bay) as “gulf,” a totally different body of water, and which is called “gulpo” in Filipino.
Even the maps are erroneous, Go said, as the National Capital Region is positioned in the middle of Laguna Bay and the province of Batangas is halved in two.
The book, intended for Grade 3 pupils, is written by Expectacion Castor Gonzales and published by a Korean firm, Daewoo International Supply Corp. This set of books is part of 12 million textbooks for Grades 1 to 5 funded by the World Bank.
The World Bank-funded project has been the subject of controversy following a case against one of the publishers for possible conflict of interest. The books have been kept in warehouses since last year following a lower court decision stopping the delivery to the district offices of the Department of Education (DepEd). The books were supplied by Daewoo, Vibal Pubishing House, and a Thai company, Watana Phanit Printing & Publishing.
Go further revealed that 50 percent of all public school textbooks on English, Filipino, and Social Studies are “defective” or full of errors.
He said these were his findings after studying all grade school level textbooks. DepEd, Go explained, had given him a complete list of approved textbooks currently being used in all public schools. He said he has yet to review elementary-level Science and Math textbooks.
“Despite the assurance from the DepEd that textbook evaluation is now being conducted on four levels, this is still the quality of content we are getting,” Go said.
The DepEd institutionalized a four-level evaluation process for textbooks following Go’s exposè in 2004. The evaluation includes the study of learning competencies; accuracy of content; presentation, vocabulary, language and use of visuals; and grammar. DepEd said the screeming process also now includes evaluators from “reputable colleges and universities.”
“These (books) are for gradeschool students, purportedly written by Phds,” said Harry Roque, counsel of one of the losing bidders, during the senate hearing. “Why do these mistakes occur despite the evaluation process allegedly implemented by DepEd?”
Roque added, “The fact that these errors are still so prevalent already indicates that there is now a need to revisit the evaluation process.”
Roque also said that DepEd should make the evaluation process more transparent to prevent further errors like those found by Go. “The existing process of evaluation is so secretive, it breeds graft and corruption.”
Go has said that he is willing to work with the education department to correct the errors. “These errors have be corrected to minimize the damage,” he said.
Go said the new editions of the controversial book Asya: Noon, Ngayon at sa Hinaharap still contains some of the errors he discovered and exposed in 2004. Publisher Vibal in 2005 issued a supplemental handbook – more than one million copies free of charge — to replace Asya, even as it published an open letter in 2004 describing Go’s allegations as “nothing more than a perverted and vicious assault upon the honor and integrity of the authors.”
Go has incurred two libel suits from two authors of Asya and two more from Phoenix Publishing in 2005, following another exposè on two of the firm’s 12 books.
Below is an excerpt from Go’s “Ninety-five Theses of Textbook Reform” which he says will help the government in implementing changes in what he calls “the country’s perennially chaotic textbook procurement program”:
Access to textbooks
· There should be one textbook per pupil/student per subject in all public schools
· DepEd should prescribe a single title per subject, per grade or year level in all schools within a region
Textbook procurement
· DepEd must procure quality textbooks
· Bidding and awarding of contracts must be monitored by a body outside of DepEd’s own Bids and Awards Committee
· Texbooks shall be procured every five years
· The bidding and awarding of contracts of foreign-assisted porojects must be monitored and regulated
· The distribution and delivery of books must be closely monitored
Process of evaluation
· A two step process of evaluation should be implemented where there will be two evaluators from the private sector and two reviewees from DepEd
· Evaluators must not include DepEd employees
· Reviewers and evaluators must not be related in any way to any of the authors or publisher of the book which they are reviewing
· Identites of both evaluators and reviewers must be revealed
Textbook standards
· All previously approved titles must undergo review and re-evaluation
· In the area of content, the following should be taken into account: factual errors, conceptual errors, biases and prejudices, negative influences on moral virtues and values
· All textbooks approved by DepEd should contain no more than 20 grave errors
Legislative intervention
· A law must be passed declaring the making of defective textbooks a crime with a corresponding punishment
· A Textbook Reform and Development Commission must be installed
· The practice of the three-shift session (three classes using the same classromm one after the other in one day) must be discontinued
· Every citizen must be given the right to look into the quality of textbooks being used in public school without fear of harassment or retaliation

WHEN school opens this year, nearly a million error-riddled textbooks will yet again be supplied to public schools nationwide.
This was revealed by Antonio Go, the educator who blew the whistle on errors found in a History textbook two years ago, in yesterday’s Senate hearing on the “textbook scam.” Go, the academic supervisor of the Marian School of Quezon City, said the newly approved public school textbook on Social Studies, Ang Bagong Pilipino, has “more than 100 errors.”
“Why had this been allowed to happen?” said Go, who has been reviewing “defective textbooks” for 10 years now. “This is the biggest error, teaching children things that are wrong.”
Department of Education (DepEd) officials who attended the inquiry said they will look into the errors.
One of the factual errors pointed out by Go was the complete name of the weather bureau PAGASA spelled as Philippine Atmospheric, Geographical and Astronomical Administration. PAGASA stands for Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration.
Another error is the word “sangko,” defined in the book as the term for the third eldest female sibling, when it should be male. The book also calls the body of water “look” (bay) as “gulf,” a totally different body of water, and which is called “gulpo” in Filipino.
Even the maps are erroneous, Go said, as the National Capital Region is positioned in the middle of Laguna Bay and the province of Batangas is halved in two.
The book, intended for Grade 3 pupils, is written by Expectacion Castor Gonzales and published by a Korean firm, Daewoo International Supply Corp. This set of books is part of 12 million textbooks for Grades 1 to 5 funded by the World Bank.
The World Bank-funded project has been the subject of controversy following a case against one of the publishers for possible conflict of interest. The books have been kept in warehouses since last year following a lower court decision stopping the delivery to the district offices of the Department of Education (DepEd). The books were supplied by Daewoo, Vibal Pubishing House, and a Thai company, Watana Phanit Printing & Publishing.
Go further revealed that 50 percent of all public school textbooks on English, Filipino, and Social Studies are “defective” or full of errors.
He said these were his findings after studying all grade school level textbooks. DepEd, Go explained, had given him a complete list of approved textbooks currently being used in all public schools. He said he has yet to review elementary-level Science and Math textbooks.
“Despite the assurance from the DepEd that textbook evaluation is now being conducted on four levels, this is still the quality of content we are getting,” Go said.
The DepEd institutionalized a four-level evaluation process for textbooks following Go’s exposè in 2004. The evaluation includes the study of learning competencies; accuracy of content; presentation, vocabulary, language and use of visuals; and grammar. DepEd said the screeming process also now includes evaluators from “reputable colleges and universities.”
“These (books) are for gradeschool students, purportedly written by Phds,” said Harry Roque, counsel of one of the losing bidders, during the senate hearing. “Why do these mistakes occur despite the evaluation process allegedly implemented by DepEd?”
Roque added, “The fact that these errors are still so prevalent already indicates that there is now a need to revisit the evaluation process.”
Roque also said that DepEd should make the evaluation process more transparent to prevent further errors like those found by Go. “The existing process of evaluation is so secretive, it breeds graft and corruption.”
Go has said that he is willing to work with the education department to correct the errors. “These errors have be corrected to minimize the damage,” he said.
Go said the new editions of the controversial book Asya: Noon, Ngayon at sa Hinaharap still contains some of the errors he discovered and exposed in 2004. Publisher Vibal in 2005 issued a supplemental handbook – more than one million copies free of charge — to replace Asya, even as it published an open letter in 2004 describing Go’s allegations as “nothing more than a perverted and vicious assault upon the honor and integrity of the authors.”
Go has incurred two libel suits from two authors of Asya and two more from Phoenix Publishing in 2005, following another exposè on two of the firm’s 12 books.
Below is an excerpt from Go’s “Ninety-five Theses of Textbook Reform” which he says will help the government in implementing changes in what he calls “the country’s perennially chaotic textbook procurement program”:
Access to textbooks
· There should be one textbook per pupil/student per subject in all public schools
· DepEd should prescribe a single title per subject, per grade or year level in all schools within a region
Textbook procurement
· DepEd must procure quality textbooks
· Bidding and awarding of contracts must be monitored by a body outside of DepEd’s own Bids and Awards Committee
· Texbooks shall be procured every five years
· The bidding and awarding of contracts of foreign-assisted porojects must be monitored and regulated
· The distribution and delivery of books must be closely monitored
Process of evaluation
· A two step process of evaluation should be implemented where there will be two evaluators from the private sector and two reviewees from DepEd
· Evaluators must not include DepEd employees
· Reviewers and evaluators must not be related in any way to any of the authors or publisher of the book which they are reviewing
· Identites of both evaluators and reviewers must be revealed
Textbook standards
· All previously approved titles must undergo review and re-evaluation
· In the area of content, the following should be taken into account: factual errors, conceptual errors, biases and prejudices, negative influences on moral virtues and values
· All textbooks approved by DepEd should contain no more than 20 grave errors
Legislative intervention
· A law must be passed declaring the making of defective textbooks a crime with a corresponding punishment
· A Textbook Reform and Development Commission must be installed
· The practice of the three-shift session (three classes using the same classromm one after the other in one day) must be discontinued
· Every citizen must be given the right to look into the quality of textbooks being used in public school without fear of harassment or retaliation

Glo's Bag of Tricks

More bag of tricks from Glo
Editorial. Daily Tribune 12/22/2006
As if it has never been caught with its hands in the cookie jar, Gloria's scheme and scam gang is again trying to slip in an obvious political racket for use in the coming national elections. The 2007 budget is again on the brink of a stalemate between Gloria and her stooges in Congress and the Senate over a P4.7- billion program to supposedly feed school children. Even at first glance, the program reeks of a scam. The Department of Agriculture (DA) is again figuring prominently in the Gloria scheme as a conduit for the importation of 1 million metric tons of rice for the school feeding program. Sen. Edgardo Angara, apparently giving the purpose of the program the benefit of the doubt, has questioned the need to import rice to feed school children. Rice importation has long been suspected as a huge source of illegal funds in this administration. Importation or outright smuggling of the grain has been associated with a person in Malaca who has a lot of weight to throw around. A grains depot in a supposed transhipment port in Quezon has been the center of the grains smuggling which is essentially done through the usual misdeclaration of imports, say 1 ton of grains is declared when the actual weight is about 3 tons of imports. The 1 million metric tons of imports for the program would make the country the biggest rice importer in Asia. Just this year, the country imported 1.5 million metric tons without the school feeding program. It is harder to envision the altruistic goal of the program than ascribing sinister motives behind it. With the Joc-Joc Bolante fertilizer scam, which has a similar dole-out character of an alibi as the feed the school children program, still being tucked, with a lot of effort, away under Gloria's skirt, the school feeding program would likely fall the same way. Malnutrition cannot be expected to be treated with the handing out of bags of rice as the shallow purpose of the program envisions. What would effectively be Gloria feeding the school children and their parents would obviously be the administration candidates that would expectedly be all over the rice packagings. Gloria's absence of credibility, as borne out by every independent survey done on her, reflects in everything that she does from the the Charter change (Cha-cha) campaign to the various photo opportunities that she pretends as her way of immersing with the people. But that is not the end of it, as there is now yet another scam in the making the school feeding program. It would not be a big surprise if the 2007 budget stalls as a result of an expected insistence by Malaca to have the program budgeted. Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita may be right in saying the school feeding scheme would not be an election gimmick since it forms part of the yearly political stunts of Gloria anyway. With Cha-cha practically in the works again, expect more of the same sleight of hand that Gloria would undertake as she turns her attention to getting a winning ticket going in the 2007 elections, a hard task with the kind of credibility she has built up with the people over the years. She knows that not only would the 2007 elections serve as a referendum on her administration, but also that there is a more fearsome future for her should her congressman-allies, a sizable number of them, lose to opposition congressmen which would then lead to her facing an impeachment bid that may well end up in a conviction by Senate trial. By hook or by crook, Gloria apparently would be working to keep her allies in the majority in Congress and this means pouring in more of the stolen public funds into the candidacies of her administration bets. If she did this in 2004 for herself and her congressmen, when she still had the support of her elite civil society, to force her way into retaining power and position, she certainly will do so again, and more desperately, since her political survival hinges on the number of congressional allies to be voted in by the electorate. It would not be malnutrition that the Gloria scheme would be addressing but the flagging political health of her administration.
Email: collator.peedee@yahoo.co.uk


Now here's the evidence of plunder.
10/16/2007 Daily Tribune
Amb Ernesto Maceda
22nd plunder.
The Commission on Audit (CoA) in a performance audit on DepEd?s operations in 2006 has found irregularities in the P1-billion Food for Schools Program.
The CoA discovered three anomalies:
1) under delivery of rice
2) delivery of ordinary rice instead of iron-fortified rice and
3) delivery of schools not on the approved list, or misallocation.
In northern Samar, only 549,744 kilos were delivered out of the 919,880 kilos allocation. In eastern Samar, only 562,620 kilos out of 704,520 targeted allocation were delivered.
Under deliveries and misdeliveries have long been an anomalous practice at NFA and DPWH. The amount undelivered is sold by officials to commercial outlets and the money pocketed. Or is it a ghost delivery and the supplier just gives the money equivalent to the officials?
Using the two Samar provinces alone as a standard, it looks like the under deliveries range from 30 to 40 percent, or a plunderous amount of P300 million to P400 million. Add to that the difference between the cost of ordinary well-milled rice and iron-fortified rice.
No less than GMA herself had some photo ops in Rizal and Camarines Sur distributing one kilo bags of rice to grade schoolers.
Now you understand why GMA was insisting on an expanded P4-billion rice distributions program and rejected the soup kitchen model even if it meant non-approval of the entire budget. The anomalies started with the first P500-million food coupon program of DSWD. Money in the amount of P1 billion from PSCO funds was also disbursed for an anti-SARS campaign which was also misspent down to barangay chairmen buying cellphones, remember! CoA should look into these two releases.
Everytime GMA releases P1 billion or more lump sum for any purpose, expect corruption in the distribution.
That is the rule of the day.
Email: collator.peedee@yahoo.co.uk