Citing the high "functional illiteracy" rates in his home region, Cagayan de Oro City 2nd district Rep. Rufus Rodriguez is prodding the government to allocate for Mindanao half of the 16,000 new teachers positions to be created this year.
Rodriguez, who won a fresh term in the House of Representatives in last week's mid-term elections, directed the call to Department of Budget and Management (DBM) and the Department of Education (DepEd).
“I am urging DBM Secretary Amenah Pangandaman and Education Secretary Juan Edgardo Angara to give Mindanao at least 8,000 new teaching positions. This will allow our island to catch up with Visayas and Luzon in terms of literacy,” he said.
He said Mindanao needs more teachers, additional training for teaching personnel, and more school infrastructure and equipment to address the problem of “functional illiteracy,” which is highest in the south, according to a recent Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) report.
“Our learners in the public school system in our part of the country have to catch up with their counterparts in Luzon and Visayas. Our education officials will not be able to solve this problem unless our island is allocated more teachers, infrastructure and equipment,” he said.
The recent PSA report showed that 18.9 million Filipinos who completed secondary education between 2019 and 2024 may be considered functional illiterate, meaning, they could read, write, and compute but could not comprehend what they had read.
Eight of 10 provinces with the “highest basic illiteracy” rates were in Mindanao: Tawi-Tawi with 36 percent, Davao Occidental and Basilan (23 percent), Sarangani (18 percent), Lanao del Sur (17 percent), Zamboanga del Sur (16 percent), Sultan Kudarat (14 percent), and Maguindanao (13 percent).
The two other provinces in the top 10 were Northern Samar (20 percent) and Samar (16 percent).
According to the DBM, of the 16,000 new teaching positions, 15,343 are for Teacher 1 (Salary Grade 11), 157 for special science teachers (SG 13) and 500 are for special education teachers (SG 14).
Pangandaman said the creation of the new positions “is in adherence to our President’s directive to strengthen our country’s education system".
It would support DepEd’s efforts to boost its teaching workforce in kindergarten, elementary, junior high school, senior high school, and its alternative learning system, she said.