When classes start today, many students will need help relearning last year’s lessons
MANILA, Philippines — Expecting most of her Grade 5 advisory class this year to have actually mastered all their lessons in Grade 4 would be futile, said Sheryl, a 46-year-old public school teacher.
The veteran educator knows by now that while the teacher before her should have failed some students, the bureaucratic headache and social pressure that come with flunking a student may have made them look the other way — and pass the student regardless of failing marks.
She knows this because she, too, passed a handful of students last school year — and the pandemic years before that — “out of pity,” said the Araling Panlipunan teacher, who is now in her 25th year of teaching.
“Teachers are always blamed when students fail. Teachers are again blamed when students drop out. The teacher is always at fault — so we often don’t have a compelling reason to fail a student,” Sheryl said in Filipino.
When classes open today and some 22 million students troop back to school, Sheryl and countless teachers will have to again bend over backward to teach the many students who made it to their classes without a firm grasp of last year’s fundamentals.
This is because for years, teachers have been pressured to promote students regardless of their grades due to a mix of factors: pressure from higher-up’s to “justify” a failing grade, incentives tied to student performance and worries that a student would drop out.
The consequence? Even as a large chunk of the student population does not know what they need to know based on the latest National Achievement Test data, only a tiny fraction — around one out of 100 — are held back a level.
So pervasive is the practice that Sheryl and two other teachers who spoke to Philstar.com anonymously for fear of reprisal said that it is “well-known” that giving a grade of 75% — the minimum passing grade for all subjects — has evolved from mere pasang-awa (passed out of pity) to “pasang-walang-gawa (passed despite no output).”
The good news is that access to basic education is better than ever. But the quiet practice could also stand in the way of the government’s refocused efforts this year to improve students’ core skills, specifically in numeracy and literacy, according to a recent comprehensive report on education by private sector-led Philippine Business for Education (PBed).
99% promoted
DepEd has never enforced an automatic promotion policy as teachers follow a “performance-based grading system,” as clarified by DepEd Assistant Secretary Alma Ruby Torio in a public event in June.
But the latest available DepEd data shows that nearly all or 99% of students were, on average, promoted to the next level in the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic (SY 2021-2022) despite widespread accounts of learning disruptions when schools shifted to distance learning.
This is even slightly higher than the promotion rate before the pandemic in SY 2019-2020 (95%).
In 2021, Senate basic education chair Sen. Sherwin Gatchalian also flagged DepEd for a report showing 99% of students passed the first grading period based on data collected from the regional offices.
University of the Philippines College of Education professor Mercedes Arzadon said there are times when the “unwritten memorandum is more powerful,” making teachers comply with a so-called rule that was never there.
“Teachers know that there is no memo allowing mass promotion, but it’s different if you look at how it’s being implemented,” Arzadon said. “For instance, dropout rates used to be high. But after DepEd set a goal of a zero dropout rate, that’s when teachers felt pressured to pass all students.”
Concern for students’ welfare, incentives drive mass promotion
Leah, who started teaching Science in 2016, said that she had to quietly “bump up” a student’s grade from 70% to 76% last year to help them get to Grade 7.
“I felt sorry for some of them, because many (children with failing grades) have parents who are uninvolved in their lives. Their notebooks with their outputs are rarely signed or noted by the parents,” Leah said in a mix of English and Filipino.
Sheryl recounted that even back then teachers would often feel uncomfortable forcing a child to repeat a grade knowing they would either be bullied by classmates or punished by their parents.
But what has changed is that as classrooms become more jampacked and parents less likely to monitor their children due to juggling multiple jobs, there are more and more students whose grades need to be “stretched” just to make the cut, the teachers said.
Besides concerns over students’ well-being and misconceptions of the “No Child Left Behind” policy, other factors driving the mass promotion of students are teacher incentives and school regional rankings being tied to student outcomes, PBed said in a May report.
This has led to the perception that teachers have no choice but to ensure the promotion of all their students, PBEd said in its report.
Arzadon said that in many cases, non-readers even make it to college. “How is a student expected to complete an engineering course if they can’t read?” she said.
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Teachers can fail students, but they would have to “explain in writing that they did everything” and justify their reasons to the school head and the district supervisor, Arzadon said.
“It’s like you’re defending a thesis,” Arzadon said.
Most students not even ‘nearly proficient’ in the NAT
The pandemic also worsened the practice of mass promotion when teachers no longer had the opportunity to assess students properly.
One parent who spoke to Philstar.com and requested anonymity said that their child managed to advance to Grade 9 in 2021 even if they were no longer submitting all their requirements during the second half of the previous school year.
Even as students were promoted en masse, DepEd has found less than half of students in all levels achieved at least a "nearly proficient" or a minimum grade of 50% in the latest National Achievement Test in SY 2021-2022. This is based on DepEd data included in documents of the agency’s proposed budget for 2024.
Philstar.com has requested previous years’ NAT data and will update this story with DepEd’s response.
An estimated 90% of all Filipino children aged 10 also suffer from learning poverty or struggle to read simple text, based on World Bank data in 2021.
“There are parents who definitely know that their child cannot read or keep up, but they continue enrolling them in school. Why? Because our society is highly credentialized. They cannot find work without a diploma,” said Arzadon, who also specializes in alternative learning for out-of-school youth.
Way forward
PBed said in an Aug. 4 interview with Philstar.com that there is a need to recalibrate how students are assessed in school.
“The disparity between the low scores of students in NAT and the high retention rate gives a clear indication that much work needs to be done,” PBed said.
“While it is not surprising given the results of other international assessments, prevalence of mass promotion and the aftermath of the pandemic, it is still worrisome,” the group added.
Students’ lack of mastery in math and reading is so dire that DepEd, on top of remedial classes, conducted a learning camp during the school break with the disclaimer that even students with passing grades might need the opportunity to brush up on lessons.
RELATED: DepEd: National learning camp not just for students flunking classes | DepEd to launch reading, math and science programs in learning recovery plan
Besides DepEd’s learning camp, the government’s answer to improving children’s literacy is to tap other agencies like the Department of Social Welfare and Development to provide afterschool tutoring classes for Grade 1 students.
More hours dedicated to learning and early interventions like tutoring programs are a step in the right direction, said Eos Trinidad, an education sociologist and professor at the University of California Berkeley.
“Remedial classes will have to be given by people outside the teachers who are already teaching. You don’t want to burden the teachers anymore. You have to have devoted teachers for remedial instruction,” he added.
Mass promotion is ultimately teachers’ response to avoid “further disadvantaging individuals who don’t have resources to begin with” and alternatives — such as a high dropout rate — are also a grim outcome that previous education officials wanted to avoid, Trinidad added.
Trinidad said that the solution may not be to “end mass promotion” as it was “never even official to begin with.”
“And because it’s not official, it’s taken on a life of its own. So we need to find ways by which we can have students gain the minimum amount of skills in the school year – and in very bad cases, catch up during the summer. It’s by doing that that you get better results,” Trinidad added.
Sheryl said that one student she failed before the pandemic “just couldn’t seem to remember anything from class.” When she suggested the parents get special intervention, they pulled the child out of school.
“So the next time I encountered a student like that, I thought: ‘I think it’s better to just pass the child – at least they’re still in the system where we can help them,’” she added.
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