Commission on Higher Education chairperson Prospero de Vera III disclosed yesterday that they will close down teacher education programs of the schools that have performed poorly in the Licensure Examination for Teachers.
"In 2024, we will evaluate and start closing down teacher education programs," De Vera told the DAILY TRIBUNE." So, we're planning to do that maybe late January. We will provide you the list of schools that are not performing well."
De Vera added that this has been approved already by the Commission en banc.
He said they implemented a moratorium on teacher education programs as more schools performed poorly in the licensure examination.
"The percentage is low, and there are schools that have zero passing rate," he said.
De Vera said they have already generated the data and the schools were classified based on passing rate.
"If you will close programs with a passing rate of 25 percent and lower, which is already low, you will close 25 percent," he said.
"We will track down their performance, let's say in the past five years, and then we will tell them (schools that have low passing rate), we give you three years to shape up, if not we will close it automatically. But the truth is, if the schools are weak, even if we give them three years to shape up; it's not dramatic, there's no magic that you will suddenly improve," the CHEd chair added.
A recent study by the Philippine Business for Education showed that only 40 percent of those who took the licensure examination for professional teachers have passed the exams over the past 12 years. The study also showed that only 56 percent out of the 2,356 teacher education institutions have passing rate below the 12-year average national passing rate for overall takers.
De Vera said unqualified faculty and poor curriculum are among the problems why many schools, particularly small teacher training institutions, have performed poorly in the licensure examination.
"There are schools whose dean is not qualified, their faculty are also not qualified, etc.," he said.
According to De Vera, there are 54,000 LET passers nationwide who are not employed as teachers.
"That means even if we don't produce graduates for one or two years, we have enough teachers to be hired," he said.
"I am calibrating that so that when I left CHEd, at least we can claim that we have closed down poor performing teacher education programs," the CHEd chair added.
According to him, more than 1,000 higher education institutions nationwide are offering teacher education program.
"One of the biggest because it's easy to offer teacher education program because you don't sophisticated equipment — what you need are classrooms, teachers, and curriculum," De Vera said.