We took offense when the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) some years ago judged our young students as among the poor performers around the world in math, reading and science (MRS).
The Department of Education (DepEd) protested the 2018 findings and even called out the international body for using “outdated and flawed data.”
The PISA 2022 assessments came, showing basically the same results: our students still lacked the minimum level of proficiency in MRS. Some improvements were noted: our students scored 2 points better in math than their 2018 performance; posted the highest improvement in reading by 7 points but dropped 1 point in science in the 2022 assessment. But they were modest, and not enough to pull us up overall because we still “performed worse than the global average.”
The PISA of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has been evaluating the literacy of grade schoolers in 81 countries every three years since 2000.
The latest PISA review took place just last month and the results, due for release by September, should show more positive results.
“Our fixation on improving our global literacy ranking should stop and, instead, focus on improving the quality of education that best suits the Filipino students.”
Recently, however, we hit another academic ebb after the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) reported that some 18 million of our high school graduates are considered “functionally illiterate.”
The PSA survey, which covered high school graduates of 2019 to 2024, showed that while our students have the basic reading proficiency, they struggle with comprehension or understanding.
The DepEd clarified later that the PSA survey represents a broader segment of the population with ages 10 to 64 and not only high schoolers.
The PSA survey, nevertheless, showed Tawi-Tawi topping the provinces with the biggest number of functional illiterates, followed by Davao Occidental, Zamboanga del Sur, Northern Samar and Basilan province.
Our neighbors Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Brunei and Vietnam are way ahead of us in the three subjects. Singapore is the topnotcher, while our own students fare only a notch higher than cellar dweller Cambodia in mastering MRS.
The Philippines made some progress in 2024, climbing to the No. 3 spot in literacy rankings in Southeast Asia from No. 4 in 2023, overtaking Vietnam, according to the World Population Literacy Review.
The United Nations’UNESCO estimates that 754 million adults and 250 million children worldwide are illiterate; many of whom are from South Asia, West Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.
A study by the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia has also established a direct correlation between low scores in MRS and the excessive use of social media.
“Children who regularly use online social networks, such as Facebook, tend to obtain lower scores in math, reading, and science than students who never or hardly ever use these sites,” the study found.
Australia has taken steps to arrest the decline in MRS proficiency by banning social media access for children under 16 years old. The move has sparked global interest that similar restrictions are being mulled in other countries like Norway, France, Sweden, and Indonesia.
The PISA and the PSA reports are reflections of the current state of our education system.
The Australian approach may be worthy of consideration, but our educational leaders and institutions should not be deterred in striving hard to be better.
Our fixation on improving our global literacy ranking should stop and, instead, focus on improving the quality of education that best suits the Filipino students.
In his 2024 State of the Nation Address, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. was explicit in his vision for the education sector: “Our system of education must be strategically calibrated to make sure that our youth are not only taught to become literate but it must also consciously develop them into problem-solvers and critical thinkers.”
