EDITORIAL - ‘A deepening crisis’

The official campaign period is set to start soon, first for Senate aspirants and then for candidates in the House of Representatives and local governments. Lawmakers will become busy with their campaigns and congressional probes will have to be wrapped up.

In the past months, various committees in both chambers of Congress have unearthed testimonies and information about wrongdoing including alleged misuse of public funds in certain agencies. The amounts involved could warrant indictments for plunder or at least multiple counts of graft and corruption.

As the congressional inquiries are wrapped up, government prosecutors must step in and pursue the probes. This is the call of over 500 education stakeholders, who have signed a statement sounding the alarm on the “deepening crisis” in the sector that they say has been aggravated by “widespread corruption and lessened prioritization” of the budget for the Department of Education.

DepEd Secretary Sonny Angara’s lament about the nearly P12 billion slashed from the 2025 budget of the department, which was meant for public schools’ computerization programs, triggered a closer scrutiny of this year’s General Appropriations Act. The resulting public uproar over what was uncovered has refused to die down. This year’s national outlay has been condemned as a GAA in aid of lawmakers’ election campaign.

The signatories to the statement that has been released include administrators and faculty of top state-run and private universities, members of education workers’ unions and several education advocacy groups.

Years before the pandemic, concerns were already being raised over the decline in the quality of Philippine education. The concerns were validated when the government decided to participate for the first time in the Program for International Student Assessment in 2018. The results were dismal, with the country’s 15-year-old students ranking at the bottom in mathematics, science and reading competencies.

In 2022, the country again participated in the PISA, which is administered by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The disappointing results were the same, although this was not surprising, considering that the assessment was undertaken as the country was emerging from two years of COVID-related school lockdowns.

Signatories to the statement lament that corruption in the education sector – as unearthed in the congressional hearings – and now aggravated by the funding priorities of lawmakers have deepened the crisis in a sector that is critical to national competitiveness and development.

The rot in the system must be excised. This requires not only improvements in the quality of education but also ensuring that funds for the sector are properly allocated and not misused. Prosecutors must not waste the findings of the congressional inquiries. Public officials must be held accountable before impunity becomes entrenched and the education crisis deepens further.