Schools, Data and Fast food chains (Day 2)

Schools, Data and Fast food chains (Day 2)

by Rey Laguda

(This is the DepEd USec Rey Laguda's Day 2 of 50-day journey being serialized here with his permission, culled from his Facebook account. - Blogger/owner)

Not many know that we have around 48,000 public schools in the Philippines. These are all under the direct supervision of the Department of Education. How does one manage an organization this big? For a fast food chain, there would probably be point-of-sale (POS) machines that would track daily performance in terms of customer count, sales, product inventories, expenses, etc. Yet for DepEd, not all of our schools have electricity. Not all schools have access to Internet signals. And when we joined in 2010, not all schools had computers.

Laguda

During the first few weeks in DepEd, I was busy coordinating and getting data that the Presidential Management Staff needed in preparation for the first State of the Nation Address of the President. Sadly, the first data set that I got and transmitted was wrong and immediately, I got my first reprimand. Something I would never forget and resolved should not happen again. There were systemic issues that needed resolving.

The prevailing mode of data collection on schools was manual submission - schools submit an accomplished 7-page survey form to the divisions where it is encoded and then regions validate and consolidate before submitting to the Central Office for national consolidation. By the time national figures on enrollment were finalized, it would already be March/April of the following year. So every year would involve stacks and stacks of spreadsheets and hours and hours of hard work.