In the media

Hace unos años, la corrupción en la educación pública era tan acusada que la ratio era de un libro de texto por cada cuatro niños. Hoy en día se están llevando a cabo varias reformas y agrupaciones municipales está siguiendo muy de cerca los manuales escolares.

Manila-based Asian Development Bank (ADB) has blacklisted 37 companies from dealings with it for up to 10 years for violating the bank's anti-corruption code. The bank does not disclose the identities of those it debars. It banned 34 firms for one to seven years and three firms for 10 years from competing for ADB contracts. Fourteen individuals were banned indefinitely and 17 for periods ranging from one to seven years.

The Department of Education has organized a campaign to urged parents of public and private school students to join the government in its fight against corruption. The department has launched a new Graft and Corruption Prevention Education Teaching Exemplars (GCPETE) which will be used by public school teachers to integrate anti-graft and corruption lessons in values education for elementary and schools.

As schools and universities move to online instruction, the new software Turnitin Originality is designed to support academic integrity by providing tools to students to self-check and correct themselves, and for professors to identify potential misconduct so that they can intervene. When reviewing submissions, Turnitin Originality checks whether the work is similar to other known text, or if there are indications that it was not written by the student. This data will facilitate conversations between instructors and students about how to discover and express their authentic voice.

During a Senate hearing on Charter change in the Philippines, concerns were raised by education experts regarding the potential risks associated with opening higher education to foreign ownership. An education adviser highlighted the country's reputation for diploma mills, warning that it could attract low-quality foreign universities instead of prestigious institutions. Despite debates over Resolution of Both Houses (RBH) 6 which proposes opening up higher education to foreign ownership, concerns persist regarding the regulation of substandard institutions and the potential commercialization of education.

Images of students wearing so-called "anti-cheating hats" during college exams have gone viral on social media in the Philippines. To ensure integrity and honesty in a fun way during exams, a professor at Bicol University College of Engineering asked the students to innovate headwear that would block their ability to see their peers' answer papers. The idea had been effective, and it was implemented for recent mid-term exams sat by hundreds of students at the College in October.

The Department of Education (DepEd) was asked to take accountability and corruption cases that led to the alleged fire sale of laptops in retail and online stores. The Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) Philippines said that DepEd failed to pay its contractor in the handling and distribution of billions of pesos worth of laptops to public schools which caused the subcontractors to sell the items to surplus shops to recover their investments. ACT called for a comprehensive report on how DepEd used its funds as well as a concrete plan on how public funds can be recovered, and projects still be realized.

The video explains how Public Expenditure Tracking Surveys (PETS) are conducted and highlights a few challenges in their implementation. A PETS aims to track the use of public money, from its disbursement to its utilization. The video takes the example of the public education budget to illustrate PETS.

Social accountability is described as the constructive engagement between citizens and the government's utilization of public resources to improve service delivery, promote rights, and enhance community welfare. In that way, constructive engagement could be citizen monitoring, which aims to track government actions.