The Philippines is grappling with a learning crisis. According to a World Bank report in 2022, the Philippines'learning poverty ranks among the highest in the Asian region. Now, to identify the learning gaps and reverse the situation, a national commission has been tapped to assess and evaluate the country's education sector. And here to talk to us about this issue, we're joined by Dr. Carol Marquis. the Executive Director of the Second Congressional Commission on Education.
Dr. Yu, welcome to Top Story of ANC. Hi, thank you for having us. My pleasure to share about the work we're doing and what we need to do together as a country.
Okay, it's good to have you on the program. Now, when you talk about the education gaps, the learning gaps in our education system that can be overwhelming, there are a lot that need to be addressed and even resolved and revamped. Now, uh... If you're to talk about what we can do as soon as possible at the least possible cost, which areas would you like to prioritize? Well, I think, let me explain and unpack the learning crisis and the learning gap that we're talking about, Stanley.
The first is that there was a 2020 World Bank report that said that our students have a 5.5 years learning gap. That means that they don't have five years worth of learning, at least, so despite the despite them being in school, despite them graduating, they finish with competencies that is five years lower than what they completed. For example, a grade 12 would be minus five years.
And we saw that firsthand when we visited some high schools over the summer, where we saw that grade eight students, incoming grade nine students could not subtract had difficulty with subtraction, could not multiply, could not divide. Meanwhile, when they started classes by the end of July, the first day of class was July 29, our students were going to study quadratic functions and algebra. And so this is a real crisis that we are facing. You can group students by three types. The first group would be those at their grade level ready, meaning to say they're grade 8, they're grade 9, they know what they're supposed to know.
There are those that need some refreshers or further mastery for that grade level. And there are those that need functional literacy and numeracy. those who really need to go back to the basics things that they should have learned at grade three level there's a current program of that at the national learning recovery program and it is a good start but it needs to be thought of more in a more differentiated way because the learners have different needs and so our call is and actually our commissioners have stand uh have filed the resolution urging deped to consider not pursuing um academic program as currently planned. For example, why does someone who is not literate or numerate sit in a class learning about quadratic functions? So let's go back to the basics.
Allow them to first get the basics for maybe 8 to 12 weeks, and only then do you put them back into the classes where they are studying grade 9 classes. So that's a first step, and it's not really... gonna cost us a lot because they're already in school no yeah so instead of them learning things that they don't understand at all why don't we go back to the basics and make sure they have that first that's what our call is okay dr you know uh this question may be too simplistic but we have to start somewhere at least uh when you talk about post-mortem how did that happen i mean that's a big question a lot of people are asking that when you talk about grade 12 students with Very, very low competencies, equivalent to that of what, grade 6 or grade 7? Right, yes, yes. That's a big question.
And actually, it will take us more than the 30 minutes that we have to talk about the reasons why we're here, no? But one thing is we need real assessments to guide us so that we know where our students are. And what we've seen in our first year report of EDCOM, so we had the year one report called the Miseducation, the Failed System of Philippine Education.
In the past year, since we were supposed to administer a lot of standardized assessments such as the like the PISA but at the local level that were supposed to tell us where our learners are but many of them were either delayed not administered at all because of failure in bidding leading us to the situation where we were surprised by the results of our students in internet these assessments should have been done at grade three grade six grade 10 and grade 12 should it so that at every level at every key stage we would have known what the problems were already. So now we're surprised. Now we need to go back and make sure that they are. getting those competencies.
Okay top of mind would be of course teacher quality, you have curriculum, you know these are the the easy targets if you will when you talk about you know laying blame on how this happened or is it the standards of the school perhaps that you know allowed in fact these students to proceed to higher levels without even a basic mastery of what they're supposed to have mastered early on. Right right I think Maybe three things. One is two relating to teachers, one relating to bullying, as you may have heard in the news in the past days. So the first is teachers. We found in the report also in our consultations with teachers that teachers really cannot focus on teaching.
They have to do so many other tasks such as being the school canteen manager, gulayan sa paaralan, operation timbang, they need to take attendance checks for four P's. So when we counted all the days of the school year, we lost 53 days of actual teaching time. because they're doing other things and because there are so many disruptions to classes. Imagine, of 180 days of teaching, last year our students lost 53 days.
We need to save those days. That's more than a quarter's worth of lessons that they did not get. So we need to take that back.
We need to be very vigilant. The second is the teachers. When we did their analysis, for example, focusing on high school teachers only, more than 60% of them were teaching subjects. they did not finish in college.
Meaning to say, for example, in science, 50% of those teaching science did not finish science. And so how could you teach something that you don't know yourself? And so what we're saying is there needs to be a greater alignment in terms of the teachers we are training in our teacher education institutions finishing college and those that we hire. and place to teach those subjects. Because it's not enough that you have a teacher, you need to make sure you have the right teacher.
And so if they don't have those skills, DepEd needs to make sure that there is training for content so that they know what subject they're teaching. And next year, there's another PISA exam, and the focus is on science. So we need to kind of be very serious about addressing that urgently. And then the third is bullying.
As you may have heard in the news, in our conversation with the president, one of the things that really struck him was that the data on the PISA shows that we are the bullying capital of the world. The highest prevalence of bullying is in the Philippines. Our students rank the highest in terms of feeling loneliness and also feeling that they don't belong in school.
You know, there are many, it's of course multifaceted. You think they are resilient though, I mean, you know, Filipinos as we are. Yeah, well, I don't know.
Maybe that's, I think it's a huge generalization. We need to be more sensitive and empathetic to the context for students. As we've seen in the data, as we know ourselves, you know, being...
former students and lifelong learners. When you don't feel safe in school, when you're bullied, you can't concentrate on your lessons. You will not really learn.
And we see the data that those who are bullied frequently, their scores really keep going down. And in schools, as was really stressed by the president, you know, in school, in a classroom, the recourse of students would really be the teachers that they have a relationship with or that they see as their mentors. We need to free up. the time of teachers from all the other non-teaching tasks and administrative tasks that to begin with they should not be doing so that they actually have time for cura personalis or really paying attention to their students and taking care of their students in the many schools that we've seen teachers are really doing their part they're really doing their best but we need to support them we need to make sure they have the resources They know what to do when there are red flags in students. They know who to refer the students to in the absence of guidance counselors because we see that 4,000 vacancies in positions in guidance counselors, almost 5,000 across all of our schools, that will take us 14 years to fix.
So we need to find short-term solutions that will address the bullying that our students are also facing so that they could focus on studying. Okay, Dr. Yisori, you know, the study results have been out since 2020, 2021. We redid our curriculum, Matatag curriculum, in fact, to address those gaps. Did we achieve anything, if at all?
Well, curriculum changes are tricky, you know, because it really takes a while before you see the results. Also because it takes a while for teachers to get used to the new curriculum. It also, at least in our context, takes a while for us to make sure that they have everything they need.
You know, teachers, we did workshops with them on the matatag curriculum. Sabi nila, this is a good... development because it decongested what used to be a very packed year.
They can't focus on the lessons because they need to keep jumping to the next lesson because they have to cover all topics. Now it's really more focused. But teachers said, let's not implement this without making sure that there's teacher training, that there are textbooks available.
So what's the recommendation now? What's the recommendation now? We need to put that aside?
Yes. Yeah. No, no. I think we should continue. As Secretary Angara has said, we will continue with the implementation of Matatag, but be very sensitive to the experiences of our teachers on the ground.
If we need and if we get feedback proactively and there's a need to pivot, we pivot quickly and iterate. Because you can't just tell things every time and then start anew. It's really refining it and making sure that it's working and then also that they have the support it's really the support teacher training textbooks for students is also what we're saying okay dr you know uh we're barely uh correcting you know the flaws of our curriculum which is traditional uh by large uh you know uh there are new demands now we're talking about uh employers and businesses saying that the filipino students the graduates need upskilling and retooling and we're not are we even there?
I mean, is the curriculum even flexible enough to accommodate these new needs? I think, and to everyone in the Second Congressional Commission on Education, what we always say is we need to make sure that at least they're functionally literate and numerate because when you start and you have the basics right, you can let them keep learning. No? And then there's a recent development. We recently passed the Enterprise-Based Education and Training Act.
So it is at the BICAM level with the House and the Senate working on the fine-tuning, the final version. But what it does is that it provides a lot of government support and incentives for companies to invest in upskilling so that workers, after you graduate, you start in a company, they're actually supported to train you further so that your skills continuously upgrade. as the needs of the labor market evolve. So we're quite excited about that.
Hopefully within the next week that will be done. So that's another development. So yes, fix the basics, create opportunities so that they could continue evolving and also upgrading their skills. And lastly, what are your expectations of Senator, now Education Secretary, Angara, who is at the helm of the Department of Education following two years of different leadership?
How do you feel about that change? So clearly, Senator Sunny, now Secretary Angara, was part of EDCOM. He was one of our commissioners. We know how serious he is about addressing the learning crisis. He's been with us for one year and a half, listening to all of these issues, sitting down with teachers, also sitting down with all of our experts, trying to understand it.
So he's really, he knows what he's doing. He knows all the issues and how to tackle them. He's also been chair of the Committee on Finance in the Senate. So we have really high hopes.
In the past month that he's been in office, we've seen a lot of things working in DepEd. Finally, a lot of these policies that we've been waiting for being issued, a lot of improvements in the policies also. So we're very optimistic that with Senator Sunny there, him really being hands-on also, that we can see a lot of developments that will really allow us to accelerate our work in terms of addressing the learning crisis in our country.
And we do have budget season, we just concluded that. I don't know how much the Department of Education is getting. It's just starting actually.
Just starting. They're defending their budget in the House of Representatives soon. Okay, are you seeing the kind of prioritization that you have wished for, that you want in place to improve our basic education at least, when you talk about matching resources, financial resources and that to our needs and objectives? Yes and no.
I think, I guess yes. In general, the answer is yes. Money is there. But we know that there are some items that still need to be funded.
For example, the admin officers that we need to make sure there's at least one in each school so that we could unburden our teachers for things that they should not be doing in the first place. And second, it's not just making sure the budget is there, making sure it's actually used because we know at least for last year. The unutilized stuff. Yeah, because the underutilization in debt was about $27 billion last year.
So, yes, make sure the money is there, but also make sure it is spent. And we are really hopeful that with Senator Sonny there, and he has been the one... shepherding the budget for the country for the past five years. He will do that for DepEd well because it's so critical for us. All right, on that note, Dr. Carol Mark Yee, thank you so much again for joining us this afternoon for this discussion.
Appreciate it. Thank you and we hope that we can all work together to address this. It really affects all of our students.
All right, happy weekend.