AT the start of every year, I attend our high school reunion — not merely out of nostalgia, but out of habit and, increasingly, out of urgency. The Class of 1962 of Manuel Roxas High School in Paco, Manila, is now severely depleted. Each year, the roll call grows shorter, the silences longer. We no longer ask who has arrived; we only quietly count who among us is missing.
I still find myself repeating — half in pride, half in defiance — that I am a 100-percent product of the Philippine public school system, from Grade 1 all the way to my PhD. That boast used to be uncomplicated. But today, it carries an unsettling question: Would the same system still make that journey possible for a child like me?
I confronted that question not just as an alumnus of a public high school, but more directly, as a legislator years ago. In the late 1980s, when I was in the Senate, we participated in what was then the most serious and comprehensive institutional reckoning with Philippine education, led by the late senator Ed Angara. The diagnosis was sobering but clear: We were faced with a multitude of issues, from weak learning outcomes, chronic shortages in classrooms and textbooks, and overworked teachers to a curriculum that tried to do and cover too much while achieving too little. This ultimately led to an education system that failed to deliver deep, lasting learning for the majority of students.
However, more than three decades later, despite reform after reform, commission after commission, and education budgets that have grown by leaps and bounds, we are still reciting the same litany of failures today.
This persistence should trouble us far more than it seems to.
Low learning outcomes remain the most damning indicator of the current state of our educational system. International and regional assessments repeatedly show Filipino students struggling with basic literacy and numeracy. These are not abstract statistics; they represent children who move up grade levels without mastering foundational skills, carrying learning deficits that only compound year after year. This accumulation of learning gaps often hardens into lifelong disadvantages, resulting in generations being embroiled in more socioeconomic struggles. When students cannot read well or perform simple mathematical reasoning, the promise of education as a pathway out of poverty becomes an impossible dream.
Infrastructure and resource gaps continue to undermine instruction. In too many communities, classrooms are overcrowded, school buildings are in disrepair, and basic learning materials are scarce — not to mention that most of our schools require upgrades when it comes to disaster resilience. The digital divide, exposed brutally during the pandemic, has yet to be fully bridged. For many public schools, “blended learning” remains a pipedream due to a lack of proper internet access for those who could benefit from it. These challenges are present everywhere, but they are most acutely felt in geographically isolated and disadvantaged areas.
Then there’s the curriculum itself, which has long been overloaded. In our effort to keep pace with global trends, we have burdened students and teachers with an excess of competencies, often at the expense of mastery. Teachers race against time, covering content rather than ensuring comprehension. This happens when we confuse breadth with rigor, which only serves to exhaust teachers and students.
Socioeconomic disparities further widen the gap. Hunger, poverty and unstable home environments intrude daily into the learning process. Schools are expected to compensate for these realities, often without the resources or institutional support to do so. For many children, the school day is the most stable part of their lives — yet stability alone cannot substitute for adequate nutrition, health care and family support.
Teachers, meanwhile, carry the heaviest load. They are asked to implement ever shifting reforms, complete extensive administrative requirements, and act as frontline responders to social problems, all while managing large classes and limited facilities. Reform fatigue is inevitable when teachers become the system’s shock absorbers, and no reform can truly succeed if those tasked with implementing it are exhausted, underpaid and unheard.
Compounding all this is a deeply centralized governance structure. Decisions about curriculum, hiring, procurement, and even classroom practices are often made far from the schools themselves. Uniformity has been prioritized over responsiveness, and control over trust. But local contexts differ widely, and schools cannot thrive when they are stripped of the flexibility to respond to the realities they face daily.
The proposed Matatag curriculum is a welcome acknowledgment that the system must refocus on foundational skills and decongest learning content. But curriculum reform alone cannot carry the burden of transformation. Without sustained investment in teachers, school leadership, infrastructure, nutrition and genuine decentralization, Matatag risks becoming yet another well intentioned intervention that raises expectations without delivering lasting change.
Real reform demands patience that survives political cycles. It requires building on what works rather than constantly reinventing solutions. Most of all, it demands honesty: Education outcomes reflect not only what happens in classrooms, but what happens in homes, communities and the broader economy. There should be no shortcuts, only sustained commitments and difficult trade-offs.
As I look around our thinning reunion tables each year, I am reminded that public education once made social mobility possible for millions of Filipinos like me. The tragedy is not that reform has failed; it’s that we have never fully committed to seeing it through.
And until we do, the promise of Philippine basic education will remain, like so many empty chairs at our reunions, painfully unfulfilled.
