MANILA BULLETIN
expressed concern that the opening of classes
Has change come to
Philippine education?
Published May 18, 2019, 10:44 PM
By Merlina Hernando-Malipot
Reforms from basic to tertiary level have been
constantly shaping the state of Philippine
education.
To date, two of the most signifi-cant
educational reforms in the country are the
continued implementation of the K to 12
Program and the free higher education.
How-ever, some groups and stakeholders
expressed concern on issues that might indicate
the cur­rent state of the country’s education.
School Year (SY) 2019-2020 officially opens on
June 3 in all public schools.
Private schools may deviate from this schedule
as long as they do not start classes earlier than
the first Monday of June and not later than the
last day of August.
Education Secretary Leonor Briones said that
DepEd has been monitoring the “readiness” of
schools to ensure a smooth and orderly opening
of classes.
DepEd also expressed readiness for the school
opening by holding its annual school
maintenance activity or the “Brigada Eskwela”
and the “Oplan Balik Eskwela” (OBE).
A teachers’ federation warned that the same
old problems will still hound this year’s school
opening.
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The Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT)
this SY 2019-2020 will be bom-barded with the
“perennial” problems of the previous school
openings.
“The 2019 school opening is most like­ly to be
welcomed with shortages on the number of
teachers, education support personnel,
instructional materials, and facilities,” ACT
Secretary General Ray-mond Basilio told the
Manila Bulletin.
Despite these concerns, DepEd Undersecretary
and Spokesperson An-nalyn Sevilla assured that
the department continues to find ways in order
to address these within the capacity and
capability of the department.
The Commission on Higher Education (CHED)
has nothing but praises for the increased
funding for higher education “at levels that no
administration has ever done in the past.”
The Universal Access to Quality Tertiary
Education (UAQTEA), CHED Chairman J.
Prospero De Vera III said, has benefitted some
1.3 million stu-dents in public universities and
more than 100,000 students in private
universities.
This coming academic year, CHED has enjoined
all State Universities and Colleges (SUCs) and
Local Colleges and Universities (LUCs) “to
synchronize its respective Academic Year (AY)
to a Fiscal Year (FY) starting FY 2019” and to
“ensure that starting FY 2020, all SUCs and LUCs
have synchronized their academic year to a
fiscal year.”
The Commission also beefs up its
internationalization and facilitating linkages
with other universities.
‘Red flags’
For advocacy group Philippine Busi-ness for
Education (PBEd), while change has come for
Philippine education it is “but only passably so.”
While PBED lauded the expanding access to
education across all levels, it also stressed the
“importance of focus­ing on actual learning” in
the context of the global economy.
“With the steady increase in education
spending, teacher and classroom gaps have
begun to close, and more children are going to
and stay­ing in schools,” PBED said.
“Thus, the Filipino workforce is becoming
increas­ingly educated,” it added.
Despite the implementation of the K to 12
curriculum designed to “provide a ho­listic
education for all Filipino students,” PBED said
the “learning outcomes tell a different story.”
This is because early childhood comprehension
remains poor, “with more than a third of
Filipino chil-dren scoring zero on both reading
and listening.”
PBED noted that achievement scores for both
elementary and secondary levels “have also
stalled at 59%, well below the 77% national
target” – similarly, passing rates at licensure
examination disciplines barely reach the target
passing rate.
PBED chairman Ramon del Rosario, Jr. said the
country has “yet to translate the country’s
successes into actual learn-ing — the kind that
prepares our people for the global economy
and the challenges of the Fourth Industrial
Revolution.”
Fili­pino graduates, he added, “lack the skills
demanded by industry and the Philippines has
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one of the highest rates of youth
un­employment” in Asia.
Citing latest data from the Interna-tional Labour
Organization, he noted that 21.7 percent of
youth in the Philippines “is not in education,
employment or training” as of 2017.
“This goes back to the poor learning that
happens in our schools as evidenced by low
scores in the National Achievement Test and
although there are noble efforts to arrest these
trends, they are at best sporadic and in grave
need of coordination,” Del Rosario added.
The Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) also
released a study in Novem-ber 2018 noting that
Filipino families are “most deprived” in
education. The multidimensional poverty
statistics was based on a Multidimensional
Poverty Index (MPI) across the four dimensions
of Education; Housing, Water and Sanita-tion
Dimension; Health and Nutrition; and
Employment.
In its release entitled, “Filipino Fami­lies Are
Most Deprived in Education” PSA noted that
“six out of 10 families in 2016 and five out of 10
families in 2017 were deprived of basic
education” and that “six out of 10 families had
at least one family member aged 18 years old
and above who did not complete basic
education in 2016 and five out of 10 in 2017.”
DepEd argued that the “parameters used for
the education dimension of pov-erty have a
tendency to mislead the public and other
stakeholders on the current state of access to
education.”
DepEd Undersecretary and Spokes-person Atty.
Nepomuceno Malaluan added that the “effect
of the historical lack of access in decades past
expressed through the educational attainment
indi-cator becomes the overriding determi-nant
for educational deprivation, and the conclusion
tends to overlook the historical progress and
the current level of access to education.”
In a recent forum also organized by the PBED,
Synergeia Foundation CEO and President Dr.
Nene Guevara said that there is an “ongoing
reading crisis” in the country.
DepEd acknowledges that there are still
challenges that need to be addressed despite
the educational reforms being initiated.
Sevilla said that these concerns and challenges
are the reasons why the de-partment is
currently “reviewing” the K to 12 Program as
well as the provisions of the Magna Carta for
Public School Teachers.

Citing results from a study which covered
Grades 1 to 6 students over 90 local
government units nationwide, she revealed that
“prior to any reading intervention” – there were
53 percent frustrated readers and 23 percent
inde-pendent readers for the school year 2017.
Guevara furthered that 23% of the sub-jects
“could not comprehend” and seven percent
“could not read at all.” She also noted that
some teachers in public schools are not
“competent readers” which is among the
factors why many Filipino students couldn’t
read properly.
“We are now adjusting our direction since we’re
done with the access and now we want to focus
on quality,” Sevilla said.
“Tapos na kami sa problema sa access – walang
problema sa access o sa mga eskwelahan na
malapit sa ating mga pamayanan dahil bawat
barangay ay meron ng elementary at ang aming
tinit­ingnan ay ang ating secondary schools,”
she ended.

Some teachers also decry that be­cause of “so

much work,” they barely have time to teach.
Under the Magna Carta for Public School
Teachers, teachers are re-quired to devote up
to “six hours of actual teaching per day.”

According to the study conducted by the

Philippine Institute for Development Studies
(PIDS) entitled “Pressures on Public School
Teachers and Implications on Quality,” teachers
are given admin-istrative or student support
role such as paper works, seminars, training
work-shops, among others.

Thus, the DepEd is urged to review its policy on

the workload of public school teachers.

Moving forward

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