THE new numbers are bad, but they shouldn’t surprise anyone who has been paying attention.
The Second Congressional Commission on Education (EdCom 2) cited distilled Flemms (Functional Literacy, Education and Mass Media Survey) results showing that 21 percent of senior high school graduates were not functionally literate — meaning they struggle with comprehension even after finishing basic education.
It gets worse when you look at proficiency as students move up the system. Using standardized assessments administered by the Department of Education (DepEd), EdCom 2 reported that learners considered “proficient” to “highly proficient” started at 30.52 percent in Grade 3, dropped to 19.56 percent in Grade 6, and further to 1.36 percent in Grade 10 and 0.4 percent in Grade 12. By the time learners reach senior high school, proficiency is almost nonexistent.
EdCom 2’s message was blunt: after decades of accumulated issues, fixing basic education would take at least 10 years of sustained reform — across administrations, not just one.
None of this is technically “new.” In PISA 2018, the Philippines landed at the bottom in reading, with over 80 percent of students failing to reach the minimum proficiency level. That was already the baseline and the weakness. We can’t be surprised as much. How can you understand and comprehend when you can’t read much?
The multi-touchpoints of the Filipino child
There are five of them. A child learns through touchpoints every day: family, school, community, media (traditional and digital) and culture. If we focus only on curriculum and classroom time, we miss the bigger drivers that shape comprehension and attention. Also, this framework tells you how holistic and collaborative education should be, and it is the responsibility not only of the parents, but also of the state, to ensure that these things are addressed before the Filipino child reaches the age of majority.
In our children-related engagements with agencies like the NCCT and CWC, it became obvious that what happens outside school often decides what happens inside it. Most of the stakeholder workshops we did with the children from Luzon, the Visayas and Mindanao in a span of four months revealed essential challenges all of us know.
Why comprehension keeps dropping:
– The content that children consume is not built to teach. As a major touchpoint (media), most content available to children is not educational. Online, it’s worse: the feed is optimized for entertainment and retention, not learning. There is no real guardrail for quality and for many families it is basically watch at your own risk. If a child’s daily content diet is short, noisy and low-value, you don’t build comprehension. This is a pervasive challenge because digital content is not (yet) regulated, and the television code we currently have in place is outdated and needs to align with the current times.
– Teacher quality is uneven and the system makes it harder. Many teachers are asked to deliver a packed curriculum to oversized classes, with limited coaching and inconsistent learning materials, while carrying heavy admin work. Add weak remediation structures, and you get the usual pattern: kids fall behind early, then the gap widens until “completion” replaces “competence.”
If we want to be honest about teacher quality, we need to improve how our systems and processes are built to sustain the kind of quality needed to bring this reading and comprehension level up. Add to that would be the pay that teachers receive — this should be commensurate again to the standards that have to be in place.
– Barangay youth programs are thin and repetitive. The stakeholder workshop for children also revealed that programs at the barangay level need a revisit given that there is nothing else outside of sports tournaments. Sports is obviously a necessary component for our children’s growth. Opportunities are available for barangay to run basic, low-cost programs: reading clubs, homework help, digital skills, arts, debate, coding sessions, even simple tech workshops. A space to have a library would be good. Phones and internet access are already there for many.
– Infrastructure-related problems. In Mindanao, conflict-affected areas continue to disrupt classes, with no option for remote or online due to lack of connectivity. This could potentially improve given the Starlink access in place especially in GIDAs (geographically isolated and disadvantaged areas).
– The social cost of OFW households. Parental absence shapes development. Many children are raised by relatives or guardians while parents work abroad. The impact is not always obvious early, but it shows up later in routines, attention, guidance and emotional stability — all of which are tied to learning and comprehension.
If learning is shaped by multiple touchpoints, the response has to be multi-stakeholder, not DepEd alone. We need an interagency task force that treats education like the crisis it is — working with DepEd, Department of Social Welfare and Development, Department of Health, Department of Information and Communications Technology, Department of the Interior and Local Government, local government units and other child-focused agencies, plus the private sector and civil society. This has to cut across bureaucracy and red tape. It needs clear ownership, clear targets and real accountability.
Focus areas are obvious: family support, school delivery, community programs and media/digital literacy.
If we keep producing graduates who cannot comprehend, it is only a matter of time before we lose competitiveness. We risk becoming a country that exports mainly labor-intensive talent, not high-skill talent — and that is an unstable future.
This isn’t just a children’s issue. It is a national trajectory issue, and we are running out of time to keep pretending it is not.
Kay Calpo Lugtu is the chief operating officer of Hungry Workhorse, a digital and culture transformation firm. Her advocacies include food innovation, nation-building and sustainability. The author may be reached at kay.lugtu@hungryworkhorse.com.