A group of education workers urged the national government to step up in addressing the education shortages and improving the conditions of teachers to provide learners with a “more favorable” learning environment.
(NOEL PABALATE / MANILA BULLETIN)
The Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) Philippines, in a statement, underscored the urgent need for the government to resolve issues in basic education that result in a more complex problems such as “mass promotion.”
“The worsening learning conditions in the country lead to more and more students who are unable to satisfactorily master the set competencies in various grade levels,” said ACT Chairperson Vladimer Quetua.
Early this week, the Philippine Business for Education (PBEd) presented a report on the state of Philippine education.
READ:
https://mb.com.ph/2023/5/29/ph-education-in-crisis-1
The group called on the government to address the “unofficial policy of mass promotion” of students which contributes to the learning crisis in the country.
For ACT, students “merely progressing in grade levels but not really learning is the wretched result of the worsening education crisis.”
Help the teachers
ACT pointed out that in the current system, “underperforming learners is a problem that teachers are solely made to bear.”
“Despite all their efforts for intervention, teachers are grilled when they give failing grades,” Quetua said.
While the said “mass promotion” is a non-existing policy as per the Department of Education (DepEd), Quetua alleged that school heads and education officials “openly encourage mass promotion as failing marks do not do good to the image of the school.”
This, he added, can also affect the DepEd’s ranking in the grant of performance-based bonuses and can hurt the Philippines’ performance in its commitment to the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals.
“Moreover, school heads say that having repeaters would only worsen the problem of big class size,” Quetua said.
Quetua also stressed that is impossible to ensure that all students learn in “oversized classes studying in cramped and dilapidated classrooms and without sufficient learning materials.”
Improve education quality
ACT pointed out that the issue of mass promotion is “more a matter of genuinely improving education quality than of giving passing or failing marks.”
Given this, ACT urged the national government to beef up its efforts to resolve the education shortages and improve the conditions of teachers and learners alike.
“There should be a comprehensive evidence-based assessment of our learners to objectively determine the learning gaps and from where a program of remediation and curriculum revision can be drawn up,” Quetua said, adding that if there will be remediation camps during school break, “teachers should be justly compensated.”
Moreover, ACT called the leadership of DepEd led by Vice President and Education Secretary Sara Duterte to take part in addressing the problems of education.
“We cannot agree more that the problem of plummeting education quality should not be solely the burden of teachers,” Quetua said. “It needs the accountability and leadership of the national government, first and foremost,” he added.