Edcom 2 and the dilemma of mass promotion
No one who cares about the state of education in our country can ignore the more than 600-page final report recently released by the Second Congressional Commission on Education (Edcom 2). Drawing from commissioned studies, hearings, consultations, and field visits, it is the most comprehensive review to date of the problems that have long plagued Philippine education, and it offers concrete recommendations to address them.
Created by law, Edcom 2 is addressed primarily to the executive and legislative branches, but the tasks it lays out demand the attention—and participation—of the entire nation.
One issue that struck me most in the report is the problem of “mass promotion”—the widespread practice of promoting students to the next grade level with little regard for actual learning performance. Often justified in the name of “no child left behind,” this practice carries no explicit mandate from the Department of Education (DepEd).
Yet its institutionalized character is evident in grading policies such as the “transmutation table” prescribed in DepEd Order No. 8, s. 2015, which upwardly adjusts actual grades to those reflected in report cards. As Edcom 2 notes, this dilutes the diagnostic value of test scores and weakens remedial intervention.
Viewed from a broader societal perspective, however, mass promotion does not simply signify lax standards. It is better understood as a symptom of systemic overload. The school system is being made to absorb the unfinished business of families, welfare institutions, labor markets, and even political authorities. Seen in this light, mass promotion functions less as a judgment of learning than as a technique of social inclusion. To discourage its use is therefore to demand that the education system relinquish many of the extra functions it has quietly taken on for society at large.
This insight came into sharp focus for me after viewing one of the early documentaries my daughter Kara produced for I-Witness. “Pag-asa sa Pagbasa” followed a 13-year-old Grade 7 student in a public school in a poor area of Metro Manila. He could write letters and numbers but struggled to read and comprehend text. After school, Kara follows him to a nearby dumpsite, where he collects plastic bags and bottles he had set aside the day before and exchanges them for cash before heading home.
At home, Kara asks his mother whether she monitors her son’s progress. She says she knows he is “behind” in reading but is busy working and unable to help. Conversations with the boy’s teachers reveal that the school is fully aware of the implications of automatic promotion. Teachers provide remedial lessons after school or during summer, but they worry that failing these students would deepen their disadvantage—and reflect poorly on the teachers themselves and the school.
What we see here, replicated across the country, are systemic contradictions that schools are being made to absorb. There are limits to what education can do to compensate for failures elsewhere. One visible limit is the system’s growing inability to apply assessment standards in a credible way—standards meant to differentiate students according to learning competency.
This is not to justify mass promotion but to situate it socially. Where poverty, food insecurity, child labor, and weak social protection persist, schools become holding spaces for children, substitutes for welfare institutions, and sites of inclusion. These are not educational functions. Yet by absorbing them, schools protect society in the short run—at a price.
When nearly all students are promoted regardless of learning, grades lose their reliability and certificates their credibility. Edcom 2 diagnoses this condition accurately and recommends ending mass promotion.
Ending mass promotion, however, is not merely an educational reform. It is a demand that the education system stop compensating for failures elsewhere in society and return to its proper function. That demand may be justified—but it cannot be addressed by schools alone.
If the state is serious about restoring academic standards, it must also be willing to confront the social costs of exclusion openly: by expanding welfare support beyond patronage, by creating pathways for early school-leavers, and by acknowledging that education cannot be made to carry the burden of poverty and inequality by itself. Otherwise, the problem of mass promotion will not disappear. It will simply reappear in more visible—and more painful—forms.
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