By Manila Bulletin
The signs of a learning crisis are clear. The numbers are no longer just alarming, they are damning. When only three in 10 Grade 3 students can read, count, and comprehend at expected levels, then further shrinking to one in five by Grade 6, and a woeful 0.47 percent by the time they reach Grade 12 or Senior High School, the problem is no longer about learning gaps. It is already a systemic failure, whether we admit it or not. The findings of the Second Congressional Commission on Education (EDCOM 2) on the 2024 Early Language, Literacy, and Numeracy Assessment (ELLNA) and the National Achievement Test (NAT) should shake the nation, not because the results surprise us, but because they confirm what educators, parents, and employers have long known: the hemorrhaging potential of the Philippine basic education.
The Department of Education (DepEd) cannot respond to this crisis with slogans, pilot programs, or another round of glossy reforms alone. The data points have exposed the brutal truth—intervention is coming too late. If 70 percent of students already fail to reach proficiency as early as Grade 3, the solution must begin long before remediation, summer classes, or test preparation. DepEd must radically refocus on early-grade mastery: fewer competencies, deeper learning, relentless assessment, and immediate intervention. Reading, comprehension, and numeracy are survival skills and should not be treated merely as routine curriculum subjects. Anything that does not serve these goals in the early grades should be questioned, simplified, or scrapped.
But reform cannot be attained in isolation. The education crisis is inseparable from the country’s long-standing culture of waste and corruption. Billions of pesos meant for classrooms, teachers, textbooks, and school connectivity have been siphoned off into ghost flood control projects, overpriced infrastructure, and phantom programs. Every peso stolen is a classroom overcrowded, a teacher unsupported, a child left behind. It is obscene to debate learning poverty while public funds continue to disappear with impunity. Accountability is not a distraction from education reform—it is a prerequisite. Without it, no curriculum overhaul or assessment reform will succeed.
The private sector, often quick to lament the poor quality of graduates, must move beyond complaints and token corporate social responsibility. Businesses have a direct stake in fixing basic education. They can fund large-scale reading and numeracy programs, support teacher training, adopt public schools, and invest in learning technologies. More importantly, they can insist on transparency and results when partnering with the government. The private sector understands metrics, efficiency, and outcomes. These are precisely what the education system desperately lacks.
Yet the burden does not rest on institutions alone. Every Filipino has a role to play. Parents cannot outsource education entirely to schools. Reading with children, monitoring homework, limiting screen time, and reinforcing discipline are foundational and must be mandatory, not an option. Students, for their part, must be taught early that learning is not merely about passing exams but about competence and character. A culture that tolerates shortcuts, cheating, and mediocrity in public life inevitably breeds the same in the classroom.
The crisis revealed by EDCOM 2 is not just a result of a typical test; this is about the kind of nation we are becoming unless we act with a sense of urgency. A country that cannot teach most of its children to read and count by Grade 3 is a country mortgaging its future. That is the reality. We can no longer afford denial, half-measures, or corruption disguised as development. Focus on education reform must be urgent, honest, and ruthless. Otherwise, learning poverty—defined by the World Bank as being unable to read and understand a simple text by age 10—will remain our most enduring national legacy, something we must avoid by addressing the issue at hand, pronto.
