EDUCATION Secretary Sonny Angara yesterday said there is no need for President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to declare a national emergency in education amid the learning crisis and the perennial problem of classrooms in public schools.
Interviewed by ABS-CBN News Channel days before the President’s fourth State of the Nation Address where education usually tops the list of ills that the government need to address, Angara said the government is doing everything to address the problems.
“I don’t think it is needed. I think the President has really taken the bull by the horns so to speak, but you have seen him exert his leadership in the education field,” Angara said when asked if a declaration of national emergency would immediately solve the problems plaguing the public education sector.
“In fact, he has this convergence strategy where he is asking even non-educational agencies to help fight the learning crisis. He even asked the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health to improve our feeding program, find food sources, and help us in our Gulayan sa Paaralan program,” Angara added.
The DepEd described a learning crisis as the learner’s inability to learn at the right grade level.
As part of this effort, Angara said Malacanang also asked the Department of Transportation to look for ways to offer more fare discounts to students and the Department of Social Welfare and Development to improve early childhood education and day care centers.
“He is really looking at the problem holistically. It’s a multidimensional program and to solve it, you have to attack it on all fronts,” Angara explained.
Earlier, the DepEd chief said the department is fully committed to resolving the learning crisis within the term of the Marcos administration.
Angara made the vow after the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) warned of the widespread “learning crisis” in the Philippines due to the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, which saw schools physically closed and the shift to online learning or through the use of modules.
He said the DepEd can manage the problem but it will need the support of everyone.
“I think we can solve the problem of kids not reading at the right level. I think we have enough programs to show that it is doable,” he added.
When it comes to the performance of Filipino students in international assessments such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), Angara said the DepEd is modernizing its own assessment while equipping teachers with cutting-edge tools and strategies to provide world-class instruction in Science, English and Math.
In his SONA last year, Marcos emphasized the need to improve the learning outcomes of Filipino students as he cited assessments which showed that more than half of learners in Grades 6, 10, and 12 have failed to reach the ideal proficiency levels and scored low in information literacy, problem solving, and critical thinking skills.
In the 2022 PISA results, the Philippines was the sixth lowest among the 81 countries that participated in the study.
The result showed that Filipino students continue to lag behind in such areas as Science, Math and Reading.
