When Secretary Sonny Angara assumed leadership of the Department of Education (DepEd) in July 2024, he made it clear that he wanted to improve the Philippines’ Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) scores for 2025, following two consecutive rounds of disappointing performance.
“My immediate goal is to raise the PISA results…. So tulungan ‘nyo po sana kami doon dahil iyong Grades 7, 8, and 9 and 10, mga walong milyon lang naman iyan na kailangan natin tulungan,” Angara said, as he appealed to the private sector to help the government in addressing learning woes.
(My immediate goal is to improve the PISA results. So, we hope you can help us with that, because for Grades 7, 8, 9, and 10, those are about 8 million students we need to assist.)
Angara said improving the Philippines’ scores in local and international education assessments, including PISA, is one of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s directives.
Even before Angara’s leadership, the DepEd had faced significant criticism over the state of education, highlighted by poor PISA results, where the country ranked second to last in the 2022 assessment.
That education officials want to pull up the Philippines’ PISA rankings is no surprise, given the sector’s long-standing struggles. The performance in the assessment would provide a quick snapshot of the state of education and possibly offer some relief if rankings improve.
For education experts, however, the government should not fixate on PISA results. Instead, the focus should be on addressing the issues plaguing the sector to improve the overall quality of education.
What is PISA?
PISA, administered by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, is an international education assessment that evaluates the ability of 15-year-olds to apply their knowledge and skills in reading, mathematics, and science to solve “real-life challenges.”
In 2022, 81 countries, including the Philippines, participated in PISA, which focused on mathematics. The 2025 assessment is the ninth installment since PISA’s inception in 2000; it focuses on scientific knowledge.
The assessment is a computer-based test that lasts two hours, gauging students’ reading, mathematics, and science literacy, with optional assessments in digital and financial literacy.
According to a DepEd order dated February 11, the approved testing window for the Philippines is from March 10 to April 11, 2025, with results to be released in 2026.
In 2024, congressional hearings were held to investigate why Filipino students continued to perform poorly in global education assessments. It was found that decades of neglect and underinvestment, along with a mismatch in curriculum and low teacher quality, were some of the key reasons.
Targeted interventions
In a Senate inquiry on September 16, 2024, the DepEd said it was preparing for the 2025 PISA by implementing a special science program for students participating in the assessment. PISA-like questions were going to be integrated into lessons under the program.
Education Undersecretary Gina Gonong told senators that the special science program would be rolled out in stages: first for all Grades 7 to 10 students, then targeting 1.6 million learners from 150 to 180 schools, and finally focusing on 7,500 to 8,000 students who will take the PISA exam.
What will happen to students not taking PISA? “They need to be continued to be taught by their teachers. When they find students who need help, they need to provide remediation programs,” Gonong said.
Gonong also acknowledged that addressing the learning challenges in just eight weeks is unrealistic. “It may take us 10 years or 20 years for our students to be grade-level ready…. There’s so much that we need to work on,” she added.
In a message to Rappler on Monday, April 7, DepEd chief Angara said “there were interventions…rolled out to different grade levels and there was a general effort to design quizzes and exam questions similar to international assessments like PISA, SEA-PLM (Southeast Asia Primary Learning Metrics), and the like.”
Angara also said they are implementing “system-wide” measures “with a view to strengthening critical thinking, inter- or multi-subject problem solving, and increased computer literacy.”
‘Not the solution’
But during the September 2024 hearing, Senator Nancy Binay already questioned the DepEd’s approach to PISA. “Hindi solusyon ‘yung tuwing magte-test, maghahanda tayo (Preparing only when there’s a test is not the solution),” she said.
While preparing or reviewing for a test is part of every student’s life, PISA is not an ordinary exam. The rest of the student population would inevitably be left behind if there are targeted interventions only for approximately 7,500 to 8,000 students taking PISA.
This begs the question: Can those trained for PISA accurately represent the 28 million Filipino students in basic education?
University of the Philippines applied mathematics professor Jomar Rabajante said focusing only on the exam-takers “might result in systematic bias or inflated PISA scores that do not reflect the actual education situation in the Philippines.”
Rabajante said, however, that if PISA results do improve on one hand, the Philippines could use this as a baseline to show that with “proper training and resources,” Filipino students can catch up with those from other countries. On the other hand, if there is still no improvement in the rankings, it would show “how problematic our education system is” and indicate that DepEd interventions made little to no impact.
Numerous problems
The Philippine government should now have a clearer understanding of the country’s educational challenges, as outlined in the Year Two Report by the Second Congressional Commission on Education (EDCOM 2). Experts believe that, if implemented correctly, interventions will begin to show results in the coming years.
One sad truth is that 55% of the country’s 45,199 public schools are without principals. Who will lead the schools in implementing learning reforms when the country is short of 24,916 principals?
Another troubling fact is that there has been a mismatch in teaching load as 62% of high school teachers are assigned to teach subjects they did not major in when they were in college. For instance, Filipino or History majors are asked to teach Mathematics.
These problems hounding the education sector stem from poor governance and misprioritization. EDCOM 2 noted that the Philippine government is not allocating sufficient funds to the sector, leading to a compounding of issues.
While the global benchmark for education spending is 4% to 6% of a country’s gross domestic product, the Philippine government has allocated only 3.2% of GDP to the education budget over the past 10 years.
Dismal PISA results are only a consequence of the numerous problems in the education sector that arguably deserve more attention.
Education psychologist and University of the Philippines professor Lizamarie Olegario described the country’s PISA preparation as another “band-aid” solution that perpetuates “educational inequity.”
“PISA is not an exam one can cram for. It was designed to assess how well students can apply what they’ve learned to unfamiliar, real-world problems. We distort the purpose of the exam and fail to raise the quality of education for the 28 million students who are equally deserving of that depth of learning,” she said. – Rappler.com
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