EDITORIAL - A new DepEd chief

Finally, a new secretary of education. The selection of Sen. Sonny Angara as the replacement of Vice President Sara Duterte in the Department of Education has been met with generally positive reactions, even from militant teachers’ groups. Sparring with teachers had been one of the distractions for Duterte in her two years as DepEd chief.

Philippine education is in the intensive care unit. Angara will have to hit the ground running to deal with the multitude of problems besetting basic education, which is the jurisdiction of DepEd. He said a priority task assigned to him by President Marcos is to improve the performance of Filipino learners in the Program for International Student Assessment or PISA administered by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

In the PISA rounds wherein the Philippines participated – the first in 2018 and the second in 2022 – Filipino 15-year-old students ranked at or near the bottom in mathematics, science and reading comprehension. A separate PISA segment on creative thinking also showed Filipino students ranking near the bottom.

Angara is a product of Xavier School and the University of the Philippines, where his father once served as president, as well as Harvard University and the London School of Economics. Except for state-funded UP, those schools are for the privileged class in the Philippines. Angara said he wanted quality education to be accessible to all Filipinos. That’s an ambitious goal that could take a generation to achieve, but he can lay the groundwork for its attainment.

Key factors affecting the quality of education are outside his mandate, starting with poverty. Weak learning capability starts at conception, with the malnutrition and undernutrition that plague expectant mothers in poor households. Experts have warned that malnutrition and undernourishment lead to physical and mental stunting. The DepEd is working with other agencies for supplemental feeding programs and improved health care particularly for early childhood learners.

The medium of instruction is also critical in facilitating learning. Teachers themselves have said the mother tongue policy needs a second look. These problems are on top of the long-running inadequacies in public school facilities, from school buildings to textbooks and other supplies, with corruption issues also needing to be addressed. Teachers need better pay, continuing training and upskilling. All these problems need full and competent attention, without the distraction of politics.