PIDS Says Quick Action Needed on PH Education Crisis

According to the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS), the educational system in the Philippines would need to address issues such as persisting inequitable access and suboptimal performance.

In a study titled “Philippine Education: Situationer, Challenges, and Ways Forward” it was deduced that despite the Philippines having the same level of school attendance as wealthier countries, the local education system struggles with yielding high-quality outcomes.

The authors of the study mentioned that “The country’s performance in international large-scale assessments confirms we have been in a learning crisis for a while now. A vast proportion of our students are below minimum proficiency levels in reading, science, and mathematics,”

“While it has been denied that automatic promotion is the official policy, the test results showing a huge proportion of students not having the required competence of the school level they are in is a piece of compelling evidence that this may not be the case.”

With the World Bank’s Human Capital Index, the Philippines’ learning gap is approximated at around 5.5 years, which is larger in comparison to other Asian countries.

“This means an average Filipino student spends more time in school but is less productive than his/her counterparts in other countries,”

Aside from this, the study noted that the quality of higher education in the Philippines is “uneven” which the authors mentioned can be traced to the low quality of basic education. Only a number of universities in the Philippines are on the world rankings list.

Source: Manila Bulletin