The Year II findings of the Second Congressional Commission on Education (EDCOM II) are both grim and urgent.
EDCOM II is a national commission tasked to undertake a comprehensive national assessment and evaluation of the Philippine education sector. It was created by virtue of Republic Act 11899, which became law in July 2022.
The second report, aptly called Fixing the Foundations: A Matter of National Survival, underscores the roots of the educational challenges that the country is facing.
It’s not a mere tagline but a call to action, the commission says. It is a call to “to realign priorities toward the foundational stages of learning: on early childhood education and nutrition, and on primary education during which critical competencies are built. Second, to strengthen the foundations of our education system, foremost, ensuring the adequacy of classrooms so that students can properly learn, prioritizing that all schools have principals and non-teaching personnel, and empowering them with the resources and support to effect change,” according to the report.
The report, released in January, builds on the findings of the first report – The Failed System of Philippine Education — that exposed the deep fractures in the education system, from underinvestment to disjointed governance to inequitable access, all of which have hounded the country for decades,
“It was an act of truth-telling, where data illuminated systemic failures, from the stunted growth of early learners to foundational deficits in literacy and numeracy that cascade across lifetimes. These revelations demanded the acknowledgment of a crisis and the clarity of purpose required to confront such a crisis,” the commission said of its first report.
The second installment breaks down the factors that have made learning difficult at various stages, from early childhood care and development, basic education, and higher education.
Specifically, the problems identified in the first stage of ECCD have remained unaddressed, setting into motion a chain of problems that have their roots at the beginning of children’s lives. Problems in nutrition and health are compounded by a mix of logical issues in classrooms and textbook delivery, for instance, to lower actual competency levels, the effect of loss of class days, bullying, and so on until the alarming attrition rates in higher education.
This campaign period, let us look past candidates’ usual grand declarations of making education accessible to all. This is a facile statement with which nobody will disagree, and is, unfortunately, a magnet for faux-champions who do not really attempt to know the issue. They barely graze the surface when they talk about education and resort to oversimplifications that deny the nuances and the deep roots of the problem.
The next time we hear candidates present themselves as education advocates, we should not simply accept and applaud. Follow this up with pressing questions on how well they know the situation and what measures they are willing to propose or implement to concretely address the problem.
Let us reject the thinking that education is valuable because it reaches millions of teachers, students, and parents who are voters. The state of education determines the state of our nation, today and in the future. It demands more than sweeping generalizations or band-aid solutions. For education to launch us to where we need to be, the shaky foundations first need to be made firm and sturdy.