By Ruby Bernardo
Chairperson, Alliance of Concerned Teachers Philippines
The latest literacy assessment results presented by the Second Congressional Commission on Education (Edcom 2) expose the deepening crisis in Philippine public education caused by chronic state neglect, severe shortages in schools and the continued overburdening of teachers.
The figures are alarming, but this comes to no surprise to us teachers who stood witness to a crisis produced by years of underfunding, overcrowded classrooms, lack of learning materials and excessive workload imposed on educators.
The worsening literacy crisis cannot be solved through mere administrative restructuring such as the proposed trimester scheme or repeated curriculum adjustments without addressing the material conditions confronting both learners and teachers.
Changing the academic calendar will not build the 165,000 classrooms needed nationwide. It will not hire the more than 150,000 teachers lacking in our schools. It will not solve the shortage of books, chairs and learning materials confronting millions of students every day.
The government has the tendency to rely on “learning recovery” programs while shifting the burden of implementation onto already overworked teachers.
Whatever gains may have been achieved under remediation programs such as the Academic Recovery and Accessible Learning (Aral) are largely due to the sacrifice, extended labor and commitment of underpaid teachers who continue to compensate for systemic failures. Teachers have once again been made shock absorbers for a broken education system.
Teachers continue to face oversized classes, clerical overload, unpaid extra work and insufficient institutional support while being expected to reverse years of learning deterioration aggravated by the pandemic and long-standing structural problems in the education sector.
The literacy crisis demonstrates the impossibility of continuously piling competencies and curriculum demands on students without first ensuring strong foundations in reading comprehension, writing and numeracy at the basic levels.
Education reform should not be treated as a purely managerial or technocratic concern.
The decades-long crisis plaguing the education sector is fundamentally a problem of state social investment. Simply put, the Marcos government must raise education spending to at least six percent of the gross domestic product and ensure that these funds directly address the shortages hounding public schools — classroom construction, hiring of teachers and education support personnel, salary increases and the production of sufficient learning materials. No amount of repackaging, trimester schemes, or assessment tools can compensate for decades of state abandonment of public education.
We call on teachers, education workers, parents and students to collectively push back against policies that merely reorganize the crisis instead of resolving its roots.
Teachers can no longer be expected to endlessly absorb the failures of the education system through sacrifice and unpaid labor. The worsening literacy crisis should serve as a call for educators and the broader school community to unite and struggle for genuine state support for public education, decent working conditions and a truly accessible and liberating education for the Filipino youth.
