Sobering wake-up call for DepEd
With the Philippines’ basic literacy rate pegged at some 93 percent, it comes as a shock to learn from a recent report that the proficiency rate among Filipino learners has declined precipitously as they went through the country’s education system.
According to the Second Congressional Commission on Education (Edcom 2), Filipino schoolchildren went from a 30.52 percent proficiency level in Grade 3, to an alarming 0.47 percent when they get to Grade 12.
Quoting Department of Education (DepEd) data from 2023 to 2025, the government body tasked to supervise the entire education sector said that the “steep trajectory of underperformance [among Filipino learners] is rooted in a failure to master foundational competencies during [their] earliest years of schooling.”
These competencies include recognizing letters and sounds, reading common words, understanding short passages, counting on their own, or doing simple numerical problem-solving.
By the time they reach high school, only 14 in every 1,000 students at Grade 10 and four in every 1,000 at Grade 12 “can demonstrate skills such as problem solving, managing and communicating information, and analyzing and evaluating data to create or formulate ideas,” according to Edcom 2, whose final report is set to be released on Jan. 26.
Historic budget
These proficiency gaps are even more acute in geographically isolated and disadvantaged areas and last mile schools, where poverty, distance, lack of access to government services, and structural disadvantages exacerbate the learning crisis. Overcrowded classrooms, poor transportation facilities, and lack of qualified teachers are among the perennial problems in such vulnerable areas.
For sure, the Edcom 2 findings are not new, with international assessments confirming the low performance level of Filipino learners in recent years.
To be fair, the current administration has rolled out possible interventions to the learning crisis: decongesting the curriculum to sharpen focus on foundational skills through the revised K-12 curriculum, and improving textbook procurement threefold, among other initiatives.
As well, the historic budget given DepEd in the 2026 General Appropriations might yet reverse the downward trend in proficiency level in our schools. The P8.96 billion funding is meant to expand the Academic Recovery and Accessible Learning Program and accelerate learning recovery, Sen. Sherwin Gatchalian said last weekend.
Gnawing hunger
The allocation will cover some 440,000 tutors for 6.7 million learners for School Year 2026-2027, and fund DepEd’s School-Based Feeding Program for Kindergarten to Grade 1 pupils. It will also extend feeding to 200 days for targeted learners, including severely wasted, wasted, and adolescent pregnant students in higher grade levels. Gnawing hunger after all can distract learners from classroom lessons, while an undernourished body cannot host a healthy brain.
Just as important is laying the groundwork for decentralizing education and moving away from the top-down, hierarchical approach of government agencies, toward a more collaborative relationship with local government units and the private sector.
Also launched in September last year was DepEd’s Project Bukas, which stands for Building Unity through Knowledge, Accountability, and Sustainability, which is an open data initiative by DepEd and the Department of Budget and Management.
Basically, its aim is to promote transparency and accountability by providing public access to critical education data, including school budgets, student demographics, and available school resources. This, while encouraging participatory governance among civil society and private entities, who can use this data to provide feedback to DepEd and suggest policy changes.
Half-baked graduates
With two years left of this administration, there is relentless pressure to use DepEd’s huge allocation for maximum showcase results. Despite such urgency, the government must keep a steady eye on several key priorities, among them addressing the classroom backlog in partnership with the private sector, that could take over the scandal-ridden Department of Public Works and Highways in the construction of needed education infrastructure.
Better training for teachers should be in the pipeline as well, along with better compensation and updating of skills to cope with the rapidly changing education landscape in the digital age.
Just as important is the timely review of the mass promotion policy that has produced half-baked graduates in the often literal and misguided interpretation of the theme, “No one left behind.” Maintaining education standards is key to making sure that learners are well prepared and ready before they are allowed to go to the next level.
Enlisting more stakeholders in delivering education should help unburden the lumbering bureaucracy that is DepEd, that can then focus on strengthening foundational learning in the students’ early years so that, hopefully, they’d do better in the near future.
