An education system in crisis: What is the way forward under a Marcos presidency?

The 1987 Philippine Constitution upholds the right of every Filipino child to free education. However, high dropout rates and poor performance in national and international achievement tests continue to hound the country’s education system.

Since colonial days, the same fundamental issues are afflicting Philippine education. These include high dropout rates, low pupil performance, poor teacher quality in a system where teachers are central to the education process, irrelevant learning materials, excessive centralization, and inadequate financial resources.

Through the decades, educational surveys and assessments have identified the same problems. In recent years, the work of reforming the problematic educational system has been guided and assisted by several large-scale reform programs and projects. A few of them were state-of-the-art interventions that were effective, at least in a pilot or experimental setting. But, unfortunately, they have not been successful on the whole for various reasons.

Extant literature as well as the analysis of education statistics divulges the continuance of these issues and concerns, which prompted leading educationists to facetiously say that the education landscape had not changed since colonial days.

At this time, about 72 percent of 15-year-old Filipinos are low achievers in the subjects of reading, math, and science. They ranked last in reading comprehension out of 79 countries. They also ranked 78th in science and math (Pisa, 2018). This implies that many Filipinos cannot read or do simple math.

Likewise, the assessment by the World Bank (2018-2019) indicates that 80 percent of Filipino students fall below the minimum proficiency levels. The World Bank discloses that the Philippines is ranked 103 among 173 countries in the Human Capital Index. The average length of schooling is 12.9 years, but what Filipino learners know is only equivalent to 7.5 years of schooling.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the level of “learning was already low,” where 70 percent of 10-year-olds could not read. Citing World Bank estimates, this figure is “now at 90 percent” amid the pandemic.

The coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated the situation. From the latest data released by the Department of Education in July 2020, only 23 million have enrolled in both public and private schools, a significant reduction from the 27.7 million enrollees in 2019. As a result, close to 4 million students were not able to enroll for SY 2020-2021. The 2.75 million of the 4 million who did not enroll were private school students. The 1.1 million students were from public schools.

With this, the number of out-of-school youth continues to grow, making it a serious issue needing to be checked to avoid worse problems in the long run. Furthermore, 865 out of 14,435 private educational institutions (2019 data) suspended operations for SY 2020-2021, displacing around 4,400 teachers and affecting at least 56,000 students.

When 90 percent of our 10-year-old children cannot read, EDUCATION IN THE PHILIPPINES IS SERIOUS CRISIS. This affects not just the young generation’s future but also the nation’s economic growth prospects. Can you imagine what kind of manpower we will have in 10 years when these children will be manning our service sector, our industrial sector, etc.?

Is there a way forward from a deep-rooted and complex education crisis caused by the government’s “mismanagement” that is made even worse by the coronavirus pandemic? One thing is alarming in the education sector when online learning becomes a permanent part of education. Zoom lectures are destroying the university experience.

Given the challenges presented above, is there a ray of hope with Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. as the country’s president?

Eden S. Anni,[email protected]