The Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) has sounded the alarm over the latest Southeast Asia Primary Learning Metrics (SEA-PLM) results, which reveal that the Philippines has fallen behind Cambodia and Myanmar in student learning outcomes, particularly in reading literacy.
ACT Chairperson Ruby Bernardo said the findings confirm what teachers have long observed in classrooms: “The SEA-PLM results prove what educators have been saying for years—that Philippine education is in a prolonged and deep crisis. Seven out of ten students failing in reading literacy is the consequence of decades of neglect, chronic underfunding, and misguided education policies.”
While the report noted slight improvements in mathematics, ACT emphasized that the stagnation in reading proficiency, unchanged over five years despite changes in DepEd leadership, underscores the system’s inability to fulfill its most basic responsibility: ensuring that children can read, comprehend, and learn.
Bernardo warned that the Philippines’ lagging performance in Southeast Asia should serve as a wake-up call for government.
“The problem is not simply poverty or the pandemic. It is the result of deliberate choices to treat education as an expense to be minimized rather than a social service to be strengthened,” she said.
Asked about lessons from Cambodia and Myanmar, ACT stressed that the solution lies not in imitation but in reorientation.
“Other countries valued foundational learning, reduced class sizes, ensured every child had a textbook, and supported teachers as professionals—not as cheap labor drowning in paperwork,” Bernardo explained.
“In the Philippines, classrooms are overcrowded, teachers and resources are lacking, and educators are burdened with non-teaching tasks—all while salaries remain low.”
The SEA-PLM report itself highlights inequality as a key driver of poor outcomes. The Philippines is the only country in the study where simply providing one textbook per child strongly correlates with higher scores.
“This is a damning indictment,” Bernardo said. “It’s not just 131 schools that need deeper support. All of the country’s 48,000 public schools suffer from shortages in teachers, classrooms, books, and learning materials. Literacy cannot improve without the most basic necessities.”
ACT cautioned that education quality will continue to deteriorate unless the government pursues genuine structural reforms rather than cosmetic measures such as curricular reshuffling or pilot programs.
“This is not just a budget issue, though chronic underfunding is a major factor,” Bernardo stressed. “It is about the orientation and character of the education system—subordinated to debt servicing, pork barrel politics, and militarized spending, instead of being treated as a public good.”
The group reiterated its demands for:
– Substantial increases in education funding
– Salary upgrading and workload reduction for teachers
– Massive hiring to address classroom and teacher shortages
– Guaranteed provision of textbooks and learning materials
– An end to policies that commodify education and undermine public schools
“Unless the government confronts these structural problems, boasting about ‘global’ or regional standards is meaningless,” Bernardo concluded. “If the state continues to neglect the education system, it will remain backward, failing, and at the bottom.” (ZIA LUNA)
