Our failing high school educationThe recent EDCOM 2 Report, which screams, “Student proficiency rates plunge from 30 percent in Grade 3 to 0.47 percent in Grade 12,” has set politicians and education planners into a new round of finger-pointing. Every year, universities accept hundreds of senior high school graduates with weak foundational skills in mathematics, the sciences, language, reading comprehension and communication. Their response – take away the power of CHED in developing the teacher education curriculum and selection of Centers of Excellence, and instead give it to the Teacher Education Council which, at that time, had done very little to develop teacher education in the country. CHED identified and awarded 120 best-performing teacher education HEIs in 2024 through the EQUATE Awards, but has not closed more than 200 non-compliant and poor-performing programs. I have witnessed public school students draw a computer keyboard on cardboard during a class discussion about computers.
