By GEMMA BAGAYAUA and PURPLE ROMERO
abs-cbnNEWS.com/Newsbreak
When
President Arroyo, in her State of the Nation address, said that
government has responded to the rice price problem by making available
commercial rice that costs P32 a kilo, she didn’t say when the price
fluctuated to that level and how long it stayed there.
Data from
the National Food Authority show that the retail price of commercial
rice stayed at P32 per kilo only for one month, in April 2008. As of
July, the price climbed to a high of P39.
This
is not an isolated case. We went over some of the statistics President
Arroyo used in her SONA and, in a number of cases, she missed out on
the context.
On education, the president said that funds for
college scholarships as well as private high school scholarship have
“quadrupled."
Declining funds for education
Total
education expenditure has generally been on the upward trend since the
Aquino administration in the late 1980s. But real per capita spending
or the amount spent by government per pupil every year has been falling
at an average rate of 2.4 percent per year from 2001 to 2007.
There
have been some improvements in performance in national examinations,
but participation rates—or the proportion of school-aged children who
are actually attending school—are going down.
Participation
rates had dropped by almost 14 percentage points from 96.95 in school
year 1999 to 2000 to 83.22 percent last school year (2006-2007).
From conviction rate to energy
Our research shows that the president committed similar lapses.
-with report from Lei Chavez