Educating DepEd

Consider it a report card on how the Department of Education (DepEd) has handled the country’s perennial education crisis.

In its report released last week, Edcom 2, or the Second Congressional Commission on Education tasked to review the problems long plaguing Philippine education, gave DepEd barely passing marks. At the same time, the commission offered solid recommendations to help DepEd’s lumbering bureaucracy overcome the drag of age-old policies and practices that are no longer responsive to the changing needs of the times.

Drawing from commissioned studies, hearings, consultations, and field visits, Edcom 2’s final report titled “Turning Point: A Decade of Necessary Reforms,” cited mass promotion, an overloaded teaching staff, the uneven concentration of book publishers across the country, and an unresponsive government feeding program as among Philippine education’s most serious ills.

Edcom 2 strongly called for the phaseout of “de facto mass promotion” among public school students despite their lack of proficiency and skills to advance to the next grade level.

Transmutation policy

While DepEd officials have denied it as established policy, Edcom 2 noted that learners in public schools are “routinely advanced” to the next level through the grading rules set under Department Order No. 8, series of 2015, also known as the transmutation policy. This is a standardized grading system where raw scores averaging 60 to 61.59 correspond to a passing grade, or the minimum 75.

Teachers consulted for the report said they found it difficult to explain to parents why their children, despite their passing grades, are still unable to read independently or handle basic mathematics.

Teachers are caught in a bind in other ways. Failing or retaining a learner would “trigger” more layers of approval or scrutiny from school heads who could blame them for a “high failure rate” in their classes. As one teacher explained, “if we fail [students], we’re told that we’ve caused trouble for the division or the school.”

Noted Edcom 2: When failing marks are equated with poor performance on the part of both students and teachers, this “creates strong incentives for teachers and school heads to promote learners rather than risk sanctions or negative evaluations.”

Heavy teaching load

While DepEd has said it would soon issue a policy shifting to a new grading system, and has proposed the adoption of nonnumeric, descriptive grading for lower grade levels, Edcom 2 recommended that, instead of promotion statistics, school and teacher performance be measured based on their truthful documentation of students’ learning gaps and subsequent efforts to address them. As it should.

Another barrier to full-scale learning is the surfeit of school-related activities, among them the Palarong Pambansa and the National Schools Press Conference, that add to the teachers’ already heavy teaching load and administrative chores, leaving them to compress an “already congested curriculum into fewer learning days,” Edcom 2 pointed out.

It also cited how recent DepEd school calendars indicate that public schools operate with an average of only about 191 actual class days per year instead of the prescribed 205, because of the more than 120 legislated activities, celebrations, and observances. These activities, which often require participating students and teachers to be excused from their classes, should be avoided in favor of simple integration into regular classroom discussions, Edcom said.

As well, DepEd should stop looking at teachers as “shock absorbers” of factors that contribute to poor learning, such as the lack of parental support at home, child work, and frequent absenteeism that may be driven by poverty, the report said.

See Also

The ‘bonus’ child

Brain power

There are gaps as well in DepEd’s textbook procurement process, with book publishers “heavily concentrated” in Luzon, with “very sparse presence” in Visayas and Mindanao, the report said. While the “National Book Development Board, an attached DepEd agency, lists 328 active publishers, only 10 publishers won all 60 lots in the latest DepEd bidding,” Edcom 2 said, citing lack of participation from its listed active publishers.

While at it, DepEd might want to look into other issues connected to book publishing: book content development and procurement, slow delivery of books, weak warehousing systems, long transport routes, the delayed release of budgets, and supply chain bottlenecks.

The Edcom 2 report also noted stunting in 23.6 percent of Filipino children that causes “irreversible neurological damage,” since malnutrition affects brain power. DepEd should ensure that the government’s feeding programs reach those who need them so that schoolkids are not handicapped from the start, the commission said.

With its record-breaking P1.015 trillion to P1.044 trillion budget for 2026, DepEd certainly has the wherewithal to implement Edcom 2’s concrete recommendations, if only to arrest the declining quality of education that crucially shapes tomorrow’s leaders and thinkers.

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