ACCORDING to a recent World Bank report, only 20% of households with school children are able to access distance learning, the lowest rate alongside Ethiopia. The lack of access to distance learning worsened “learning poverty” by 90%, it added.
How did we get here? Because the perennial problems in the education sector have not been addressed adequately.
Even before the coronavirus pandemic struck and gave additional challenges in the delivery of quality education, our education system had long been in crisis with the problematic curriculum due to the shortages in classrooms, textbooks, and lack of support for our teachers and other education support personnel.
The many paperwork and additional work that the Department of Education requires from our teachers also affect the delivery of quality education to our learners. Instead of focusing on their lesson and how they can adequately teach their pupils, they also have to attend many webinars, finish mountains of paperwork, solicit for bond paper for the printing of modules, among many other additional tasks demanded from our teachers.
What’s frustrating is that DepEd would rather focus on whether or not the World Bank should have asked it for comments in their report before publicizing their study showing that nine in 10 Filipino kids aged 10 cannot read.
It would be wise for DepEd and the whole Duterte administration to focus on ensuring that their policies and the budget provided for education will be able to address these perennial problems of learning loss and shortages in the supplies, facilities and benefits for our teachers and non-teaching personnel.
DepEd shouldn’t even be surprised by the World Bank report. The support provided to schools and teachers is sorely lacking. Teachers themselves and even principals are the ones looking for ways to ensure that children have learning modules.
If from the very beginning adequate funding was provided for textbooks and modules, internet allowances and gadgets for teachers and students, and if schools were given adequate budget to ensure that their facilities were suitable for face-to-face classes, schools would not have been closed for far too long and it would have been easier for our education system to adjust and adapt despite the COVID-19 pandemic.
