Culling the herd: a troubling trend in education in Western Visayas

Take a look at the chart below; the data is from the Philippine Institute of Development Studies’ Economic and Social Database, projected until 2015 using a best fit (least squares) linear regression to predict y values from x values — in other words, using Excel’s FORECAST() function ^^

Educational Participation and Cohort Survival Rate in Region 6

You can examine the data here: Google Docs | Microsoft Excel | Sun OpenOffice Spreadsheet | Adobe PDF

Net enrolment ratio or participation rate is the ratio of the enrolment for the age group corresponding to the official school age in the elementary/secondary level to the population of the same age group in a given year. The official school age is 6-11 for elementary and 12-15 for secondary.

Cohort Survival Rate is a measure of the efficiency and effectiveness of the delivery of education services in the country, and is defined as the percentage of enrollees at the beginning grade or year in a given school year who reached the final grade or year of the elementary or secondary level. This means that from a cohort or group of 100 Grade 1 pupils, only 62 pupils reached Grade 6. [Source: National Statistical Coordination Board]

Participation rate is going down, and cohort survival is going up; from the years 2002 to 2007, there’s been a 10% decrease (from 85.95% to 75.44%) in participation rate for elementary, and a 4% decrease (from 57.32% to 53.83%) in high school, while cohort survival rates increased by 12% (from 62.84% to 74.77%) for elementary and a 7% increase (from 73.51% to 81.06%) for high school in the same span. That means that while a child in Region VI enrolling in elementary or high school is more and more likely to finish his/her education, fewer and fewer are able to begin. What this implies — and I freely admit this is just my reading of the data — is that poorer families are having an increasingly difficult time sending their children to school; what’s left are the children of middle and upper class families that can afford to finish basic education anyway.

In short, a “culling” of the herd.