Geography of educational inequality

A few days ago, I came across an intriguing map while browsing on social media. It was no ordinary map, as it provided us with visual data on the educational attainment of Filipinos in every barangay.

As one social media post put it, “What makes the [map] project stand out is its hyper-local lens: users can now see the level of educational attainment in their own barangay.”

For decades, we have comforted ourselves with national averages. We cite a “96 percent literacy rate” or celebrate the massification of higher education as proof of progress. But averages are a convenient fiction as they hide the valleys by measuring the peaks.

This facade was recently dismantled not by a government commission but by a University of the Philippines economics student. Timothy Hormigos, using 2020 census data, transformed cold numbers from over 42,000 barangays into a living, breathing map of Philippine education. The result was a startling visual indictment of our postcode lottery — where a child’s future is largely decided by the street where they were born.

The implications of this map go far beyond the classroom. They strike at the very heart of how we govern and ultimately how we vote.

Hormigos’s map exposes a brutal urban-rural divide. While town centers radiate with high concentrations of high school and college graduates, the peripheries remain darkened by an incomplete basic education.

This visual disparity complements harrowing data about our educational system. In 2023, the World Population Review (WPR) reported an average IQ score of 81.64 for the Philippines — well below the global average of 85–115 — placing the country near the bottom of Southeast Asia, ahead of only Laos and Indonesia.

These figures mirror the dismal performance of Filipino 15-year-olds in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), where the Philippines ranked last in reading and second-to-last in mathematics and science.

Beyond standardized testing, the crisis of functional literacy is even more acute. Data from the Second Congressional Commission on Education (EDCOM 2) reveals that by Grade 12, proficiency in core subjects nearly vanishes, with a staggering 0.47 percent of students considered truly proficient. Collectively, these metrics point to a grim reality: we are not just facing an education gap — we are witnessing a systemic collapse. The problem isn’t just the lack of school buildings and classrooms, as the DepEd always puts it, but about the functionally illiterate graduate.

For the Department of Education (DepEd) and local government units, this map is a GPS for justice.

Historically, the dominant approach to educational funding and program formulation and implementation has been scattergun, targeting many places at once without a clear focus.

With this hyper-local data, the excuse of not knowing where the need is has evaporated. We can now see exactly which barangays are being left behind. Governance in the education sector must move toward surgical interventions that place resources not just where the most people are, but where the deepest deficits exist.

As Hormigos prepares to present these findings to leaders like Senator Sonny Angara, the challenge is clear: will we use this data to fund the “invisible” barangays, or will we continue to prioritize the loud and the local elite?

By focusing on the voting-age population, the map’s most provocative feature is its political impact. Since the data indicate that the Filipino youth living in the peripheries struggle to complete their basic education, it means that an increasing number of them have failed to develop into enlightened and civic-minded citizens.

I do not wish to sound elitist, but education is the ultimate gatekeeper of political rationality. In areas where educational attainment is low, patronage politics and vote-buying often fill the void left by a lack of critical civic engagement.

The map visualizes the geography of the vote. For those of us who have made voter education part of our professional commitment, it leads us to the places where we are most needed. If we want to move away from personality-based politics toward platform-based governance, we must first address the educational deserts that make people vulnerable to populism and disinformation.

A voter who cannot read a budget or understand a policy proposal is a voter whose agency has been stolen long before he or she reaches the precinct.

Skeptics of Hormigos’s educational attainment map point to its methodological constraints, specifically its reliance on the 2020 census data and the demographic focus on those aged 25 and older.

While these are valid academic observations, they are not reasons for dismissal. In the policy world, perfect is often the enemy of good, and waiting for a flawless dataset is a luxury our crumbling education system cannot afford.

These challenges should not lead the government to discard the map as insignificant. On the contrary, this visualization provides a baseline that has never existed at this scale. Rather than rejecting it, the government should adopt, refine, and modernize this framework. Integrating real-time enrollment data and regional performance metrics would transform this student project into a permanent, state-of-the-art tool for better policy.

Hormigos has handed us a mirror. It shows a Philippines that is deeply fractured, where the right to education is evidently a luxury of geography rather than a guarantee of citizenship.

We should not be content with being a literate nation on paper while being an unequally educated nation in practice. The map has been drawn and the gaps are visible. The only question left is whether our leaders have the political courage to cross those lines and invest in the barangays that have been left in the dark for far too long.