A stone’s throw from the House of Representatives’ sprawling complex in Quezon City is a congested public elementary school literally crawling with thousands of students, including a great number struggling with their ABC. 

When he took over as principal at the President Corazon C. Aquino Elementary School in 2024, Gerry Isip made a startling discovery: Some students had moved up the academic ladder to Grades 5 and 6 without the necessary literacy skills.

“Our nonreaders can’t even recognize letters,” said Isip, 53, who organized five sections of nonreaders in all grade levels to read text in Filipino and English. “By God’s mercy, the Grade 6 students were able to graduate with reading skills.” 

The school on IBP Road in populous Barangay Batasan Hills has 7,910 students for school year 2025–2026, thrice more than its capacity of 2,500.

In the campus measuring 3,900 square meters, the students are split into morning and afternoon shifts but are still too numerous to fit into 75 classrooms. A solution was found in partitioning 44 classrooms to accommodate all. Imagine a class of 32–45 crammed in that small space.

Pandemic lockdown

But for Isip, the illiteracy of some students has more to do with the Covid-19 pandemic that shuttered and forced schools worldwide to go into online classes from 2020 to 2023, than with classroom congestion. 

The hourslong classes on screens, often interrupted by fluctuating internet signal or lack of mobile data, took a heavy toll on both students and parents, some of whom ended up filling out their children’s modules to meet school requirements.

In the slums of Batasan Hills, where the parents and their children live cheek by jowl in cramped homes, the struggle was even more dire, Isip said.

“I have observed some learners getting high—bangag—because their parents were sniffing drugs in the same room during an online class,” he said, speaking through a pandemic-era plexiglass installed atop his table in his office.

Public schools opened their doors to 27.6 million students last June 16, encumbered with perennial shortages in classrooms, armchairs, water and sanitation facilities, and textbooks.

But for experts, the elephant in the room is the students’ functional illiteracy—meaning they can read, write and compute, but are unable to comprehend. Unless reversed, this state of affairs can doom their prospects for employment or entry into college after senior high school.   

“This is a real and widespread learning crisis,” Akihiro Fushimi, education chief of the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef), reminded government officials a day after the school opening. 

Citing data from a 2019 study, Fushimi said 90% of Filipino children in Grade 5 cannot read at their expected level, and 83% continue to struggle with basic mathematics. 

The data shows that Filipino grade schoolers had inadequate literacy and numeracy skills even before the health crisis triggered by the Covid-19 virus from Wuhan, China, broke out in early 2020. 

Congested curriculum

The January 2025 report of the Second Congressional Commission on Education (Edcom 2) also noted that most Grade 3 students were one to two years behind curriculum expectations during the foundational years of learning, and were progressing to Grade 4 despite poor competencies. 

This is expected to grow worse in later years. Proof of this is the commission’s finding about Grades 8 and 9 students struggling with basic subtraction and multiplication in the Department of Education’s learning camps, it added. (Edcom 2-Fixing the Foundations: A Matter of National Survival)

“It’s all about the congested curriculum,’’ Pasig City Rep. Roman Romulo, co-chair of Edcom 2 and chair of the House committee on education in the 19th Congress, told CoverStory.ph.     

Romulo said that for years he had been pushing for the reduction of the roster of subjects for Grades 1 to 3 into core subjects on literacy and numeracy. 

He lamented that it’s only in this school year 2025–2026 that DepEd is fully implementing the so-called Matatag K-10 curriculum, after a phased implementation in 35 out of 35,000 schools beginning in 2023. 

“We know that there’s already a problem in reading comprehension. Should we not address that immediately? And that is by reducing the number of subjects,’’ Romulo said, recalling his conversation with Education Secretary Juan Edgardo “Sonny” Angara.    

He added: “This is a low-hanging fruit, this curriculum change to focus on functional literacy. We have done this before. Why is there a seeming resistance to a simple change?”  

He wondered why DepEd had to train its teachers again on the curriculum, which, he pointed out, they know like the back of their hand.  

In the new curriculum, Grade 1 students are taught only five subjects—Language; Reading and Literacy; Mathematics; Makabansa; and Good Manners and Right Conduct.

And so are the second graders, with English and Filipino replacing Language and Reading and Literacy. For Grade 3 learners, Science is added as the sixth subject. 

Leonor Briones, the education secretary in the Duterte administration (2016–2022), introduced the reform, according to Romulo.

Experts agree that education reforms were set back under Vice President Sara Duterte, who concurrently headed DepEd from 2022 until June 2024 when she quit amid allegations of her misuse of confidential funds.

She is fighting trial in the Senate impeachment court for culpable violation of the Constitution stemming from allegations of corruption and threats to assassinate President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., among others.   

In its January report, Edcom 2 welcomed the Matatag curriculum reforms, but said these were hobbled by the late delivery of textbooks and lack of teacher training and resources.

For instance, only 35 out of 90 textbook titles were fully delivered for Grades 4 and 7 as of January, halfway through school year 2024–2025, it said in the report titled “Fixing the Foundations: A Matter of National Survival.”

Childhood care, development

But there’s more than meets the eye.

Edcom 2 homed in on early childhood care and development (ECCD) as a critical factor to boosting literacy and math achievement by Grade 3 and enhancing achievement in later years. Its importance, however, has been largely ignored, the commission said. 

“Only 25% of Filipino children meet the recommended energy intake between ages six and 12 months, with particularly low rates among those from impoverished households,” it said.

Also, 97% of parents believe that children under 5 are “too young” for school, and the government’s allocation of P3,870 per child for health-related ECCD services is lower than the average P8,700 in low- and middle-income countries, the commission said.

Incoming ACT Teachers party list Rep. Antonio Tinio believes that the crisis gripping the education sector stems from the government’s “under-investment’’ in education.

The current government allocation for education stands at 3% of the gross domestic product, only half of the Unicef standard of 6% of GDP, Tinio said in a Zoom interview.

“I have a bill mandating that education spending should be at least 6% of the GDP. We will refile that just to put it out there that that should be the policy,’’ he said.

Last April, civil society groups petitioned the Supreme Court to void the P6.326-trillion national budget for 2025 passed by Congress for allegedly circumventing the constitutional directive to allocate the biggest budget to education.

With a P913-billion allocation, education ranked a poor second to infrastructure in priority. Worse, the petitioners argued, this had been “bloated” by aggregating nontraditional education-related funds from various agencies and offices, such as the Philippine Military Academy and the Philippine National Police, among others. To be continued