By Estanislao Albano, Jr.
It is inexcusable that with all the needed information at its fingertips, the Second Congressional Commission on Education (EDCOM II) is peddling the baseless claim that private schools are in the same league with public schools.
In his keynote address during the recent general assembly of the Diocese of Cubao Educational System where he presented the findings of the EDCOM II in 2024, Commissioner Jude Acidre claimed that both public and private schools are affected by the learning crisis.
The remarks of Acidre echoes the statement in the EDCOM II Year One Report that the country’s dismal performance in the 2022 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) was true to “most of our schools, public or private.”
How the writers of the second annual report of the EDCOM II and Acidre arrived at such a conclusion is a mystery. What is crystal clear is the report of the Department of Education (DepEd) on the results of the 2022 Pisa, the “PISA 2022 National Report of the Philippines,” shows a wide gap in the performances of private schools and public schools.
Had the 340.66 overall score of public schools been the basis of the Philippines’ ranking in 2022 PISA, the country would have been second to the last of the 81 participating countries. On the other hand, had the 412.33 score of private schools been the basis, the country would have been in 51st place. That’s a separation of 71.67 points and 29 rungs which by no stretch of the imagination can put the private schools and public schools in the same boat.
Among the eight Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) which took the 2022 PISA, the country is in seventh place but if only our private school students took the test, it would have been in fourth place for a difference of three rungs.
Private schools posted a 17.67 points or 4.47 percent increase in the 2022 PISA over their score in 2018. On the other hand, public schools only managed an increase of 1.33 points or 0.39 percent. How could the two groups be similarly placed when the ratio of their respective increase in their scores over that of 2018 is 13:1 and to begin with, the score of private schools in the 2018 PISA was 55.33 points or 16.30 percent more than that of public schools?
Too, how could our private schools be in crisis when compared to the 4.47 percent increase in their score in the 2022 PISA, on account of the Covid-19 pandemic and other factors Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries suffered an overall average performance decline of 8.33 points in the cycle?
The EDCOM II’s ignorance or deliberate denial of the fact that schools run by the DepEd eat the dust of private schools is ironic because as the body tasked by law to turn the country’s basic education around, it is incumbent upon it to get its facts about the current state of our basic education right. And one such fact as clearly evidenced by the 2022 PISA results is only the public schools are in a learning crisis as private school students managed to outperform the students of 30 countries in the gold standard of international student assessment.
Because of its charade that private schools are as bad as public schools, the EDCOM II has shut the door to valuable inputs on how the former are able to produce students who could perform respectably in international student assessments. Had the commission acknowledged the superiority of private schools, it could also avoided the folly of spending taxpayers’ money to benchmark with some leading Pisa countries when our private schools present a more realistic target and more compatible model and consulting with the sector does not cost much.
Without first asking our private schools how they were able to make their students good enough for the 51st rank, the EDCOM II could not wait to find out from Vietnam, Finland and Australia how they got to 34th, 12th and 11th places, respectively. If that’s not putting the cart before the horse, I do not know what is. **
