Edcom 2’s prophetic role

We owe the Second Congressional Commission on Education (Edcom 2) our thanks for its third and final report and, more broadly, for the work it has done in the last four years. During a distressing period of growing public dismay and discontent over the apparent inability of the government to render competent service, it has persevered in addressing the critical and often controversial issue of education reform and produced a milestone study.

The scope and the wealth of the information and insights Edcom 2 has gathered make its body of work the convenient and indispensable starting point for understanding the formidable problems that have eroded the quality of education in the country over many decades. It will take some time to undertake the rigorous review that the reports require and deserve. But Edcom 2 directs our attention to one obvious, critical issue that the country has historically failed to address. It introduces its concluding summary report with the caution: “Unless reforms are carried out with consistency and permanence, the same deficiencies will reappear.”

Edcom 2 doubtless hoped that this warning would help push a sustained effort to realize its reform agenda. The quote itself, dating back to a much earlier time, comes from Paul Monroe, who was recruited by the American colonial government from Columbia Teachers College, and who produced in 1925 a 700-page survey of Philippine education. Edcom 2 compares, early in its third report, one of the key findings of the Monroe Survey with the World Bank report a hundred years later. In 1925, only 40 percent of Grade 4 children could read at the expected level; in 2025, only 10 percent of Grade 9 students could understand what they were reading.

In citing Monroe’s data on literacy among Filipino schoolchildren, Edcom 2 places its own concern over the issue in a historical context. It also underlines for us both the magnitude of its mission and the difficulty of evaluating Edcom 2’s enduring impact. The Edcom 2 study is not just a piece of academic, historical research that can be debated and resolved by further research. It is explicitly intended to serve as a living policy document to guide a 10-year road map for the implementation of recommended reforms.

We can accept or debate the significance of Edcom 2 evidence, the accuracy of its analysis, and the soundness of its recommendations. But we cannot know whether its policies will succeed or fail until after 10 years. Maybe. Two complicating factors make the outcome unpredictable. Edcom 2 itself has noted that education policies have failed not because the problems they addressed were unfamiliar or the proposed reforms were unsound. Many times, the failure was in their implementation.

The second complication departs from the observation of the Roman senator and historian Tacitus about war: everyone claims credit for a victory, but no one admits ownership of a defeat, which is then often conveniently attributed to a single cause or actor. Edcom 2’s analyses conclude that many factors and decision-makers contributed to policy failures. With so many hands on deck, however, as its reform agenda plays out, the policy outcome will not belong to a single villain or hero. But it is still possible and important to determine who is accountable.

As Edcom 2 repeatedly notes in its three volumes, the lack of sustained monitoring, feedback, and enforcement of accountability results in the failure to make timely corrections of implementation mistakes. Too often, the responsible agencies failed to note when reforms were already missing expected metrics, or, more seriously, to detect the failure to provide the program with required personnel, financial, or administrative support. Such failures have doomed otherwise sensible policies.

Hence, Edcom 2 reports must continue to be consulted and critiqued to keep the reform agenda on track. Hopefully, the authors and their patrons will encourage critics, both supportive and skeptical, to keep comparing reported achievements against the premises, data, or conclusions contained in the reports. Continuing discussions and even disagreements will keep the crucial education issues on the national agenda.

Though their terms have ended, Edcom 2 members can still play a prophetic role, without presuming that their prophecies will come true. Even biblical prophets had no assurance that they would ever see their prophecies realized in their time. But the prophetic mission calls for the commitment to persist in bearing witness to the ills that have been exposed and to engage with those who are content to dismiss them.

Sadly, our education prophets may suffer the fate of the Greek seer Cassandra. The Olympian gods blessed her with the gift of seeing the future and the hope that she could avert its calamities. But she was also cursed with the burden of preaching to those the gods had blinded to what she saw—and she would never truly be believed.