When it rains, it pours.
It seems there’s a never-ending list of challenges confronting the education system in this country, with authorities simply unable to solve them.
We’ve written in this space about the findings of international institutions such as the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) that only 10 percent of students in the Philippines met the minimum reading standard and 17 percent met the minimum mathematical standard expected at the end of primary education.
There’s also the World Bank study that “more than 80 percent of children do not know what they should know” in school.
That’s a searing indictment of the poor quality of education in the country, but where does the problem lie?
The culprit, as it turns out, also lies in the fact the quality of education that future teachers are getting needs much improvement as half of the schools training them perform poorly in the annual licensure exams for educators.
That’s the conclusion reached by the Philippine Business for Education (PBEd), a private sector-led advocacy group founded and financed by the country’s top business leaders.
What is to be done?
The group believes both the Department of Education (DepEd) and the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) should collaborate to upgrade teacher quality in the country given the direct correlation of teaching to the performance of students.
The advocacy group cited the 2022 research done by the government’s socioeconomic policy think-tank Philippine Institute for Developmental Studies (PIDS), which found low teacher qualification was a major factor in the low-quality education and poor performance of students.
The PBEd researchers looked at 12 years’ worth of data from licensure examination for teachers (LET) from the website of the Professional Regulation Commission (PRC) and correlated these with other data complied by CHED.
The group found that 56 percent of the schools nationwide offering teacher education had below-average passing rates in the licensure exam since 2010.
Poor performance in the licensure exam for teachers puts teacher quality into question, PBEd said.
Moreover, the study found that the overall passing rate of LET examinees was lower compared to that of other courses, such as architecture, nursing, civil engineering and accountancy.
That’s not all.
Only 2 percent of schools offering teacher education were classified as high-performing, the PBEd said, noting the government should consider closing down the education programs of low-performing schools.
But more important is a thorough assessment of the curriculum of teacher education and the questions in licensure exams so the DepEd and CHED’s professional standards for teachers can improve considerably over time.
We cannot have, to be honest, the blind leading the blind in our educational system.