Duterte’s resignation and the failed education system

SARA DUTERTE showed herself quite unprepared for the challenges confronting the country’s education system.  She did not discuss her thoughts on the paramount learning crisis that called for policy action. 

As vice president, she had expressed her desire to lead the Department of Defense. But President Marcos Jr. assigned her to education, an appointment that was hardly auspicious from the start. It exemplified the low priority given to education by the newly elected president and by politicians in general. 

What ails the public school nationwide is complicated. Politicians tinkering with curricular matters can make things worse. Good initiatives operate on a limited horizon of six years.  Effective programs can be wasted by poor implementation, as new appointees take over. 

Actually, the lack of leadership in Department of Education (DepEd) in recent years goes back to the inertia of Leonor Briones, Rodrigo Duterte’s appointee. As education chief, Briones, whose academic background was in public administration, took issue with the World Bank’s flagging the poor scores of Filipino students in a global ranking system — without consulting her. Instead of buckling down to examine the issue, she protested in pique and asked the World Bank to apologize. While the education budget has always been the largest in the Cabinet, the proposed national budget in 2020 was cut down, another signal of the low priority given to education during the senior Duterte’s term. 

Fast forward to June 19, 2024, the Presidential Communications Office announced Duterte’s resignation from her roles as DepEd Secretary and vice chairperson of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict. Her departure came amid escalating political tensions between the Duterte and Marcos camps over the past year. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. accepted her resignation. In her first and final press appearance since joining Marcos’ cabinet, Duterte confirmed her resignation, citing no specific reasons; but she stressed it was not out of “weakness” but out of “compassion” for teachers and students.

Her request for huge amounts for confidential and intelligence funds for the two offices she held, the Office of the Vice President and the DepEd. A wave of public protest swept through social media over these amounts, requested for the first time for these two offices. It did not help when the Commission on Audit (COA) further revealed the speedy disbursement of PHP125 million in OVP funds within 11 days in 2022. Duterte denied any misuse of funds but withdrew her requests.

In 2023, her various orders ranged in impact from minor to major changes. In March, she prohibited the teachers from engaging in volunteer work and extracurricular activities so they could focus on teaching and learning. In May, ordered the removal of e classroom decorations, tearing off posters from the wall herself which media captured photos. She proposed the integration of mandatory scouting in the K-12 curriculum in August.

In 2023, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) study conducted in 2022 claimed the Philippine education system lagged five or six years behind the set standards. The same study placed the country at the lowest of 64 countries in creative thinking.  The assessment should have been discussed openly but Duterte did not refer to the PISA scores even as she pleaded to work for educational reforms in the curriculum development and teacher welfare. 

Rappler reported that Duterte responded to calls to revise or remove the K-to-12 curriculum by initiating a review in January 2023. She established a task force to conduct this review, setting May 2024 deadline for its completion. According to Rappler, this review was still ongoing at the time of Duterte’s resignation.

In August 2023, Duterte also launched the MATATAG curriculum, which aimed to streamline K to 10 education to focus on literacy and numeracy skills. The MATATAG curriculum had been introduced only in 35 pilot schools across 13 divisions in seven regions, out of 47,678 schools nationwide. Initial studies by the Edcom 2 and the Philippine Institute of Development Studies have yet to find improved competencies in the pilot schools. 

According to a report by the Philippine Daily Inquirer, DepEd highlighted the low rate of completion reported in May this year, with approximately only 847,467 teachers and personnel had undergone training out of 267,900.

Duterte’s resignation ends an underwhelming tenure of half-baked initiatives and unfinished actions reflecting her lack of interest even in the efforts she started. 

Duterte’s resignation poses a significant challenge for current administration — to find a more qualified head for the education department that has been without effective leadership since 2022. The new Secretary must be a seasoned professional from the education sector, dedicated to transparency, accountability, and fostering robust stakeholder engagement. Apart from these qualities, the appointee must ensure that in the remainder of the term, he will sustain the good initiatives already in place. 

Duterte’s resignation does not make that much of a difference to the state of education. Education secretaries can only do so much during the six-year term. The six-year term is a limited horizon and the education policy must begin to operate on principles for the long term.

The plan for education reform must be undertaken as a long-term plan that involves the different needs of different regions and their diverse communities. This counters the traditional one-size-fits-all all in the search for solutions to education’s myriad and complex problems, an approach fostered by a highly centralized bureaucracy.  

Media should take the lead in this effort, moving away from reporting official statements and politicking among leaders. Newsrooms must scale up their reporting on DepEd given the dire learning situation that afflicts basic education. Journalists must cover DepEd with more informed context and background. To interpret or investigate the faults and failures as well as to highlight the gains when these come around, journalists must acquire enough knowledge about why so much of what is done about learning ends up in failure.