A member of the House Committee on Basic Education and Culture has filed a resolution to look into the poor educational performance of the Philippines.
Dasmariñas City Rep. Elpidio Barzaga Jr. filed House Resolution 626 after the Philippines ranked the lowest in reading comprehension and second lowest in science and mathematics among 79 countries.
The test was held by Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) among 600,000 15-year-old students in 79 countries through the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa).
“This should serve as a wake-up call and instill educational reforms in order to improve the quality of our education. Thus, we welcome the Department of Education [DepEd] when it joined the Pisa for the first time in 2018 as part of its reform plans on quality basic education,” Barzaga said.
Pisa compared the quality of basic education of the 79 member and partner countries of the OECD. According to the OECD web site, each “cycle” of the study explores a distinct domain such as Collaborative Problem Solving (Pisa 2015) and Global Competence.
Barzaga said a review of relevant existing laws must be conducted to improve the country’s ranking in the reading comprehension assessment.
According to Barzaga, in Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), another international assessment test, in 2003, the last year the Philippines participated in the study, the country ranked only 34th out of 38 countries in high-school mathematics, and 43rd out of 46 countries in high-school science.
The lawmaker, citing a United Nations 2016 report, said the Philippines has the highest literacy rate at 97.95 percent among Southeast Asian countries, such as Brunei Darussalam, Indonesia and Singapore.
Also, citing a paper published and submitted to the International Workshop on Data Disaggregation for the Sustainable Development Goals by the Philippine Statistics Authority, he said less than 40 percent passed the licensure exams in various fields; less than 50 percent of faculty members in higher-education institutions have at least a master’s degree; and only 13.3 percent have a PhD degree.
In the same paper, he said 25.6 percent in elementary schools and 33.2 percent in secondary schools have access to the Internet for teaching purposes.
“Worse, even in this digital age, there are still schools with no access to electricity, 88.7 percent in elementary schools and 93.1 percent in secondary schools. It was also stated that in 2017, there are 3.6 million out-of-school children and youth, where there are more female out-of-school children and youth than males. It was found that lack of personal interest is the main reason for not attending school, while marriage and family matters for females,” he added.
Barzaga said in Dasmariñas, Cavite, in a focus group discussion, where public-school teachers, head teachers, school heads and supervisors discussed the Pisa results, they observed that learners do not pay much attention in reading, attributing to too much exposure in social media and electronic gadgets.
He said public-school teachers, administrators and supervisors have multiple ancillary tasks that limits their time to prepare better lesson plans and instructional materials.
He added that classroom shortage results in the shifting of classes wherein the number of minutes per learning area is shortened by at least 10 minutes to 20 minutes.
Class size is also adjusted from the standard ratio of teachers to pupils of 1:35 for Grades 1 to 3 and 1:45 for Grades 4 to 12 that even go up to 1:60.
“[There is also the problem of] lack of libraries and reading centers because funds are directed to the building of classrooms,” he added.