EDCOM 2: Only 200k students retained despite declining proficiency rates

Only 200,000 of the 24 million learners nationwide are being retained in their grade levels despite plummeting proficiency rates, according to the Second Congressional Commission on Education (EDCOM 2) on Tuesday.

“There are only about 200,000 students who get retained. This means that there are students who get retained, but a very slim proportion of the 24 million students that we have,” EDCOM 2 Executive Director Karol Mark R. Yee told BusinessWorld in an interview.

“We really need to understand better if this is a figure that we can trust? Is this a credible figure that is representative of all those who are really struggling?” he added.

In its Final Report, the commission found that separate assessment tests showed “non-proficient” students grew from 30% in Grade 3 up to 74% in Grade 12.

“The steep decline is from Grade 3, Grade 6, Grade 10, and Grade 12,” Mr. Yee said.

“People may be progressing by grade level, they keep getting promoted without really having the knowledge or ensuring that the competencies are really there,” he added.

In terms of reading proficiency, 88% of students struggle to read according to their grade level at the beginning of the school year.

For junior high school students, 40% to 52% are at least two grade levels behind in reading, based on the Philippine Informal Reading Inventory (Phil-IRI) assessment.

“These evince the urgency of addressing mass promotion and the rolling out of well-designed interventions to address literacy gaps at the secondary level,” EDCOM 2 said in its report.

“Literacy is the gateway to learning numeracy, and other competencies across subjects,” it added.

‘Mass promotion culture’
A key issue underscored in EDCOM 2’s report is the country’s mass promotion culture and its correlation with other problems existing within the education system.

“For us, mass promotion is many things. There is no real policy of DepEd (Department of Education) to promote students automatically, but it is a confluence of multiple factors,” Mr. Yee said.

“It is really more about looking at the system as a whole and addressing all of these barriers that stop our teachers from being able to support their students well,” he added.

Teachers’ professional autonomy in deciding learners’ promotion is heavily influenced by the pressure from higher authorities in the school.

“We’ve also heard from many stories of teachers that they usually get castigated by principals or other colleagues,” Mr. Yee said. “If they fail any student they have to justify to the principal, to the division office, why a student had to fail.”

“It seems like they have to prove that they did everything and exhausted all supports available, when in fact no support or very little support was given to them themselves as teachers,” he added.

The DepEd’s policy on grade transmutation also amplifies the demand to pass all students despite not meeting the expected skills and knowledge.

In the Transmutation Table from DepEd Order No. 8 s. 2015, the initial grade of 60 to 61.59 is transmuted to 75, or about a 15-point increase.

“We have constantly been repeating and advocating that it is time to review that policy, maybe phase it out at the soonest possible time,” he said. “It is giving us a semblance of normality, or that everything is okay when in fact it is not.”

EDCOM 2 proposes reconfigurations of the Results-Based Performance Management System (RPMS) and Office Performance Commitment and Review Form (OPCRF) to ensure that no incentives are given related to learners’ promotion.

“The performance of the school is tied to completion rate, passing rates, zero dropout rates, and therefore, it is all connected,” Mr. Yee said.

“As long as we keep doing that, we are really unintentionally reinforcing mass promotion, which is why our position is we need to revise our targets,” he added.

In January, the Alliance of Concerned Teachers Philippines called for the review of RPMS following the death of a public school teacher during her scheduled classroom observation. — Almira Louise S. Martinez