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removing the actual evaluation of the textbooks from the responsibilities of the Instructional Materials Council Secretariat (IMCS) of the DepEd. The IMCS does not have enough experts of its own, but usually taps many external experts from public and private academic institutions. Also, given the budgetary constraints of the IMCS, it gives relatively low compensation to the external experts, and thus the IMCS neither attracts the best experts nor provides enough incentives for the experts to exert their best efforts in the evaluation process.

It would be more efficient to decentralize textbook evaluation by accrediting appropriate departments of reputable academic institutions and Centers of Excellence like the UP National Institute of Mathematics and Science Education, the Ateneo de Manila Department of English, the UST Department of Science, etc. to evaluate the textbooks. The role of the IMCS would be to accredit these institutions and centers, which can charge reasonably competitive evaluation fees from the textbook publishers. In this way, the DepEd can do away with its complex 5-step evaluation system, which unfortunately has allowed some low quality textbooks to squeak through owing to the loopholes created yet obscured by the sheer complexity of the system.

In this scheme I propose, the IMCS would consider for DepEd procurement only those series of textbooks that obtained seals of approval from the accredited institutions and centers, and it would require that the names of the approving institutions and centers be prominently displayed on the textbooks themselves. The risk of ruining their reputations would push the institutions and centers to make sure that they do a good job. The IMCS would do occasional random checking in which, if it found a low quality textbook among those that an accredited institution had approved, it would pursue an established process to remove accreditation from the negligent institution.

In this scheme, the competition in the public school textbook procurement system among publishers whose textbooks obtained seals of approval would be on the basis of price and some technical requirements and no longer on textbook quality.

This proposal is consistent with National Book Policy #5, which provides that “the State shall support an efficient book utilization program for educational institutions.” Also, Implementing Policy 5.5 states: “the Department of Education shall initiate measures to decentralize evaluation of textbooks, references and other instructional materials particularly those which are locally developed and/or intended for specific geographic areas or cultural communities.”

The DepEd's over-centralized and complex system of large-scale textbook procurement strongly attracts attempts at grand corruption that involves some textbook publishers and DepEd office-holders who discover the loopholes created and obscured by the complexity of the system.

Some DepEd officials are suggesting that the tasks of writing and producing the textbooks should be returned to the DepEd and taken away from the textbook publishers of the book industry. If the DepEd has not yet been able to implement an efficient and effective evaluation system for the textbooks it considers for procurement, what makes it so sure it can do better in the whole publication process (with research, writing,evaluating, editing, and designing activities)?

This can be found on his blog http://discoverthegift.blogspot.com  

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