Education’s fundamental issues

Last Friday, schools began the gradual shift to the old academic calendar, which, as the Department of Education (DepEd) put it, follows “what majority of Filipinos want.” The department, however, should not take this as the cure-all to the problems that ail our education system.

The new adjusted end date of the current school year (SY) 2023-2024, under DepEd Order No. 003 S. of 2024, was on May 31. Students will be back in school on July 29 to start SY 2024-2025; this means that their school break this year is a few days short of two months. DepEd will continue to gradually move back the school calendar until it aligns with the old April-May school break. Based on its projected timeline, it will take up to SY 2028-2029 to fully revert to the old schedule. This was done to prevent a drastic change in the school schedule and entailed a deduction of about seven to eight days from the just concluded school year.

To recall, DepEd adjusted the school calendar in 2014 because of the frequency of class suspensions due to typhoons and other climate-related events. The change was also implemented to align the Philippines’ school calendar with other countries—which is another matter of whether or not it was effective in advancing Filipino students’ learning quality.

Not a fool-proof solution

That school schedule, meanwhile, meant that students were in school at the peak of the dry season from April to May, but, starting last year, it became obvious that it was not conducive to learning because of the extreme heat with reports of students collapsing due to scorching temperatures. This year, schools had to shift to blended learning because of the heat wave.

dfSkeptics consider changes in climate patterns as normal but there is a consensus among scientists that global warming is accelerating and will continue to disrupt human activities if drastic action is not taken. For students, it will no longer matter what months they are in school because extreme weather events have disrupted overall temperatures. While it is a good move on the DepEd’s part to ensure a safe environment for students by adjusting the school calendar, it is by no means a fool-proof solution especially when the weather has become more unpredictable and harmful. Disruptions could happen at any time of the year regardless of whether it is dry or wet season in the country. In other words, it is not just heat waves that students—or the general public—have to contend with but also heavy rains, or worse, super typhoons. It must be further emphasized that DepEd cannot keep changing the school calendar because extreme weather events are now possible year-round.

Learning environment

The Philippine Business for Education said as much. “Changes in the academic calendar must take into consideration the continuity and conduciveness of the learning environment. Our students need a fixed schedule. We hope that this recent decision will be firm and consistent among administrations so as to minimize learning disruption,” it said in a statement on its website. It also highlighted the need for DepEd to address issues that made the existing school calendar unbearable such as classrooms that do not have enough ventilation, creating a less conducive environment for learning.

As Inquirer columnist Eleanor Pinugu wrote in “Learning in the heat” (Undercurrent, 4/8/24): “The cost of inaction could be tangibly measured in lost learning opportunities alongside the compromised health and well-being of students. Solutions need to include a long-term commitment to transforming our educational infrastructure to meet the realities of a warming world—including allocating funds to install air-conditioning and/or improve ventilation in schools and modernizing buildings to regulate indoor temperatures more effectively.”

Classroom backlog

The reality is that there are not even enough classrooms for public school students, let alone adequately ventilated or air-conditioned ones. The DepEd, based on the second DepEd Basic Education Report of Secretary and Vice President Sara Duterte released last January, built only around 3,600 classrooms in 2023 out of the planned 6,300. The report also said that 6,200 classrooms were in various stages of construction while 800 others were in the procurement stage. By now, if it was going to meet its objective, at least 4,000 new classrooms should have been finished.

The DepEd not only needs to catch up with the classroom backlog, but it must ensure that these new buildings conform to the demands of the times. Beyond this basic need, there are more fundamental problems that it must address. It can keep on changing the school calendar to give in to public opinion but if it does not devote a chunk of its budget to essential items—as it should—such as higher salaries for teachers and better learning tools to improve the performance of our students, the country’s learning crisis will only continue and even worsen.