The recent revelation by the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) that nearly 19 million Filipinos who finished high school between 2019 and 2024 are functionally illiterate and cannot effectively comprehend what they read is certainly worrisome.

Citing results of the PSA’s 2024 Functional Literacy, Education and Mass Media Study (FLEMMS), Sen. Sherwin Gatchalian, chairman of the Senate basic education committee, said the number can even be higher. "There are approximately 5.8 million people who are not basically literate...If you look at functionally illiterate, there are 24.8 million who have problems comprehending,” he said.

The functionally illiterate, according to Dr. Karol Mark Yee, executive director of the Second Congressional Commission on Education (EDCOM), are those unable “to use reading, writing, and numeracy skills … to understand essential information, such as correctly interpreting dosage instructions on medicine bottles, comprehending utility bills, calculating discounts, or accurately filling out application forms. It’s about reading maps or understanding basic graphs.”

Sen. Gatchalian said DepEd should ensure those who graduate are functionally literate. “The very basic goal of basic education is that students become functionally literate. That's not the case now… In our EDCOM rounds, we have detected kids as old as 15 years old who cannot read a simple story,” he said.

Such a predicament of young Filipinos was earlier seen in the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The PISA results showed that 15-year-old Filipino students got a mean score of 340 points in overall reading literacy, much lower than the OECD average of 487 points. The score in mathematics was 353 points and it was 357 points in science. Both scores are way below the OECD average of 489 points.

In the 2022 PISA, the performance of Filipino students was also dismal.

In mathematics, only 16 percent (a far cry from the 69 percent average across OECD countries) of Filipino students assessed attained at least Level 2 proficiency. At a minimum, PISA said, “these students can interpret and recognize, without direct instructions, how a simple situation can be represented mathematically (e.g. comparing the total distance across alternative routes, or converting prices into a different currency).”

In reading, 24 percent (far from the OECD average of 74 percent) of Filipino students attained Level 2 or higher which enables them to “identify the main idea in a text of moderate length, find information based on explicit, though sometimes complex criteria, and can reflect on the purpose and form of texts when explicitly directed to so.”

In science, only 23 percent (OECD average is 76 percent) of students in the Philippines attained Level 2 or higher. “At a minimum, these students can recognize the correct explanation for familiar scientific phenomena and can use such knowledge to identify, in simple cases, whether a conclusion is valid based on the data provided,” PISA said.

No significant difference can be seen between the 2022 PISA and 2018 PISA wherein the Philippines ranked lowest in reading literacy among 79 countries, and second to lowest in mathematics and science.

A study in 2014 by the Philippine Business for Education (PBED) also revealed that a general aptitude test among college freshmen, mostly graduates of public schools, “found that only three percent were ready for college.”

“Most were entering college with only Grade IV to V reading and math competencies. Overall mean percentage score of fourth year high school students in DepEd’s 2011-2012 National Achievement Tests was 48.9, when the goal was a score of 75. The scores were 46.37 and 40.53 for mathematics and science, respectively. These are all evidence of a weak basic education system,” PBED said.

There’s also the 2021 World Bank (WB) report which pegged the Philippines’ rate of learning poverty – or being unable to read and understand a short, age-appropriate text by age 10 – at an astonishing 91 percent of Filipino children.

Could teacher/teaching quality be the culprit? It seems so, gauging from another WB report titled “Fixing the Foundation: Teachers and Basic Education in East Asia and Pacific.”

“Only seven percent or less of teachers in Mongolia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and the poorer provinces in Guangdong, China, demonstrate highly effective practices, while more than two-thirds use ineffective or weak practices. Weak teaching practices translate into poorer learning outcomes,” the WB said.

Strengthening the teacher’s subject knowledge and pedagogical skills is vital. “In the Philippines, the average elementary or high school teacher in 2015 could answer fewer than half of the questions on subject content tests correctly,” the WB said.

Attracting and selecting more effective teachers is essential. The WB cites Asian countries where competitive pay – equal or higher than the national average salary of civil servants – makes teaching attractive. On rigorous selection, it cited South Korea where only the top 10 percent of high school graduates are admitted to teacher education programs.

In looking for ways to address the education crisis, the elephant in the room is malnutrition in its various forms. UNICEF Philippines said that “one in three Filipino children under five years old are stunted” and that stunting in the first 1,000 days of life “leads to poorer performance in school because malnutrition affects brain development, and malnourished children are more likely to get sick and miss classes.”

Tackling malnutrition is as urgent as ever as its ill effects manifest in the performance of Filipino students. It’s high time that all stakeholders intensify efforts in battling the menace of malnutrition. ([email protected])