Big elephant in the (class)room

The Programme for International Student Assessment 2022 results/factsheets are a cause for alarm. Its immediate implication is that, under whomever's watch, the Department of Education has morphed from bad to worse. The naked proof is that, compared to the PISA 2018 scorecard, the Philippine educational system has literally done worse — sans significant improvement.

If the pattern continues, we may have to view the problem in the larger picture, which means that this kind of cultural and intellectual backlog, if we may call it that, will affect our tertiary education just as badly. The next generation of professionals in various fields — be it in the arts, sciences, engineering, technology, and so forth — may not be as globally competitive as those in better-performing countries from the secondary level and beyond.

Every window of opportunity will then be closed to Filipinos by foreign hiring firms, unless and until we would have scored significantly and comparatively better than other member economies of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which oversees the PISA. Presently, the big arrows point in the direction of educational decay.

Grossly deficit in this realm, we might find the country's educational system in a state of advanced decomposition rendering the DepEd ever inutile with state subsidies wasted. A poor secondary education logically means a poor tertiary education forward.

In fact, it makes no sense to improve the secondary level without first fixing the primary level of education. In short, the whole gamut of the Philippine educational system is in dire need of a wholesale overhaul.

The culprit may have been the K to 12 paradigm shift, though purported to be the silver bullet for the educational malaise. Or the technical and vocational courses aggressively pursued by the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority which placed a higher premium on a Filipino workforce to fill the global manpower supply chain.

In effect, skills training replaced math, reading, science. Technical education played proxy for higher professional and academic pursuits in a highly competitive world. How far has the so-called Technical-Vocational Education and Training sector come to harnessing global competitiveness, work readiness, and reducing poverty?

What has it actually achieved in the "middle-level workforce," if anything at all? In light of DepEd's K to 12, however seriously flawed it is being inordinately pursued, the continued existence of TESDA must be viewed as redundant, or vice versa. A secondary education with a K to 12 component or a pivot to TESDA with or without a tertiary education component might just be a classic case of "competencies interface" cancelling each other out.

For the next PISA in 2025, DepEd has little time to prepare the next generation of 15-year-old students who would participate in this global testing and performance assessment.  Meantime, policy makers and educators should roll out a comprehensive curriculum in mathematics, reading, and science.

The 15-year-old students of the same socio-economic scale from participating countries periodically compete to gauge academic performance in math, science, and reading. By way of comparative ratings in PISAs 2018 and 2022, we logged 340th and 347th in reading, 353rd and 355th in mathematics, and 356th and 355th in science, respectively. Is there light at the end of the tunnel?

With dismal ratings in PISA 2018 (lowest in reading, second lowest in math and science) among 79 countries and in PISA 2022 (6th to the last in reading and math, 3rd to the last in science) among 81 countries, how in heaven's name can DepEd officials conveniently dismiss the stats as merely representing "different paces of learning," even categorizing this whole affair as "stable," and the performance as "positive?"

How can one legislator even argue that interpreting the results is "a matter of perspective," our performance as "resilient," and we should be happy we "held the line" when the results firmly reflect a performance and proficiency way below the OECD average in all three domains — in fact literally scraping rocky bottom?

Bureaucrats, kaput!