We’re sinking, and we’re busy attending meetings

By Francis Allan L. Angelo

I will not mince words. The new report from the Second Congressional Commission on Education (EDCOM 2) is a national tragedy, a 30-year-old failure, and a multi-generational indictment of our priorities.

The number is 24.8 million.

This is nearly a quarter of our entire population. Twenty-four million, eight hundred thousand Filipinos who cannot apply basic reading, writing, and numeracy skills in their daily lives.

This means 24.8 million people who might struggle to understand the instructions on a medicine bottle. Twenty-four million who can be easily duped by a fake news headline, a predatory loan contract, or a politician’s empty promise. Twenty-four million citizens hampered from “informed citizenship,” as the report so clinically puts it.

When we read that, we should feel a cold knot of dread in our stomachs. This number is the breeding ground for disinformation, the anchor on our economy, and the shadow that dims our nation’s future. The World Bank, in its 2022 report, had already warned us. They found that 9 out of 10 Filipino children under 10 suffer from “learning poverty”—meaning they cannot read and understand a simple text. We are failing our children from the very beginning.

And how did we get here? How did we let this happen?

The answer, it turns in, is as absurd as it is infuriating. We are not failing due to a lack of effort. We are failing because we are distracted. We are failing because our education system has become a bloated, bureaucratic nightmare that has forgotten its one, true purpose: to teach a child how to read.

DEATH BY 261 MEETINGS

If you want to understand the absurdity, you need only look at one number: 261.

During a recent hearing, EDCOM 2 revealed that the Department of Education (DepEd) is involved in 261 interagency bodies.

Let’s read that again. Two hundred and sixty-one.

DepEd is bloated with national coordination jobs, a professional meeting-sitter. Education Secretary Sonny Angara confirmed that DepEd chairs at least 20 of these bodies and co-leads another 21. This number is a stunning increase from the 63 interagency engagements identified in EDCOM’s earlier report, meaning the problem is not only bad; it’s accelerating.

This is a tragicomedy.

While millions of children in far-flung barangays are sharing a single, tattered textbook, the highest-paid officials in our education department are sitting in a conference room (or a Zoom call) discussing… what exactly? A council on national heritage? A task force on disaster preparedness? A committee on healthy lifestyles?

All of these things may be important. But are they more important than teaching 24.8 million people how to read?

We are killing our children’s future, not with malice, but with meetings. We are drowning in a sea of memos, steering committees, and coordination councils. The core mission—basic literacy—has been abandoned, lost in a flurry of bureaucratic obligations. While we are busy “aligning synergies” and “engaging stakeholders” in 261 different rooms, the main ship is sinking.

The solution isn’t to “streamline participation,” as the department mildly suggests. That’s like offering a cough drop to a cancer patient. The solution is radical surgery.

DepEd’s leadership must perform a public act of liberation. They should, tomorrow, publicly resign from 250 of these interagency bodies. They must send a clear, unequivocal message to the President, to Congress, and to the Filipino people: “We are the Department of Education, not the Department of Everything Else. Our mission is to end illiteracy, and we will not be distracted from it. Send us the minutes.”

TEACHERS-TURNED-CLERKS

This bureaucratic bloat at the top is a cancer that metastasizes, and it hits our teachers the hardest. If the leadership is distracted by 261 councils, the teachers are being buried alive by the result of those councils.

The EDCOM 2 report hit the nail on the head. Teachers are drowning in “excessive non-teaching tasks.” This is the key. The 24.8 million figure is the direct, mathematical result of disrespecting our teaching profession.

We hired educators, trained in pedagogy and child development, and we have turned them into clerks.

Let’s be specific, because the details are damning. As EDCOM 2 executive director Karol Mark Yee pointed out, our teachers are now forced to be:

• Social workers, coordinating compliance for the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (RA 11310);
• Optometrists, implementing vision screening under RA 11358;
• Caterers, managing feeding programs with the DOH and DSWD;
• Disaster coordinators, serving as DRRM leads under RA 10121;
• Drug counselors, overseeing the National Drug Education Program;
• Data-entry clerks, inputting endless reports, forms, and administrative paperwork.

The Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) has been screaming about this for years. Their studies have shown that teachers spend a significant portion of their work week—sometimes up to 70%—on non-teaching tasks. This isn’t a bug in the system; it is the system.

This is the “why” behind our rock-bottom scores in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). In 2022, the Philippines ranked 6th to last out of 81 countries in Reading. How can we expect a teacher to develop a child’s critical thinking and reading comprehension when she doesn’t even have time to teach? Her mind is on the feeding program report due at 3:00 PM and the DRRM drill she has to coordinate.

DepEd’s response? They are “hiring administrative officers so that every public school will have at least one by 2026.”

By 2026.

This is not a solution but an insult. The crisis is now. The child who cannot read today will be the functionally illiterate adult of tomorrow.

We need an immediate presidential executive order, a “Teacher Liberation Act.” This EO must place an immediate moratorium on all non-teaching tasks for classroom teachers. Full stop. Let the teachers teach. Let principals manage. If the government needs to hire a separate army of admin clerks, social workers, and nurses to run its other programs, so be it. But stop cannibalizing the teaching profession to do it. This is what EDCOM 2 means by “teach first, and administrate second.”

30-YEAR FAILURE

The most painful part of this story is that none of it is new. This is a 30-year-old wound that we have allowed to fester.

The news story reminds us that in 1993, the first EDCOM (EDCOM 1) issued the same exact warning. Back then, the number of functionally illiterate Filipinos was 14.5 million. The commission’s primary recommendation was to “allow the department to focus solely on basic education.”

This recommendation led to the “trifocalization” of the old Department of Education, Culture and Sports (DECS) in 1994. The goal was to create three focused agencies:

1. DepEd (for basic education)
2. CHED (for higher education)
3. TESDA (for technical/vocational skills)

It was a brilliant, logical plan. It was meant to give DepEd a clear, streamlined mandate: Fix basic literacy.

And what did we do?

We did the exact opposite. As EDCOM 2 notes, since 2001, we have piled more than 150 new laws and executive issuances onto DepEd, adding even more responsibilities. We created a focused agency and then immediately buried it under a mountain of new, unfunded mandates.

We ignored the 1993 diagnosis. And so, the 14.5 million functionally illiterate in 1993 have metastasized into 24.8 million today.⁶ This isn’t just a failure of policy. It is a failure of national discipline, a failure to heed a warning that was given to us a generation ago. We are reaping the whirlwind of our own legislative and bureaucratic short-sightedness.

This 30-year failure makes our current crisis all the more unforgivable. We knew. We just didn’t care enough to act.

LEGISLATIVE MALPRACTICE

This brings us to the real source of the sickness. It is easy, and a bit lazy, to blame DepEd for all of this. Yes, its bureaucracy is bloated. Yes, its leadership is distracted. But who is doing this to them?

The answer is Congress.

For decades, our senators and congressmen have been committing what can only be described as “legislative malpractice” against our education system.

Every time a lawmaker wants to look good, they file a “feel-good” education bill. Let’s add a curriculum on financial literacy! Let’s mandate a program for disaster preparedness! Let’s add a health and nutrition initiative!

These laws are almost always enacted without matching budget allocations.

Education Secretary Angara himself admitted it. He estimated that to fully fund all the programs Congress has mandated for DepEd, it would require more than PHP 1 trillion.

One trillion pesos.

This is the scam. A politician gets a press release and their name on a law, and our teachers get another unfunded mandate, another report to file, another hour stolen from teaching. Congress gets the credit, and our teachers—and our children—pay the price.

We have a long, tragic list of these unfunded laws: the Alternative Learning System (RA 11510), the Mental Health and Well-Being Promotion Act (RA 12080), the Academic Recovery Program (RA 12028).⁷ All noble. All important. All dumped on DepEd’s doorstep with an empty wallet.

This isn’t “helping.” This is actively sabotaging our education system.

We need an immediate 5-Year Legislative Moratorium. Congress must pledge to pass zero new laws that add any burden or mandate to the Department of Education, no matter how well-intentioned.

Instead, their only job for the next five years should be to fund the laws they have already passed. Go back, find the P1 trillion for all those unfunded mandates, and pay your bill. Stop writing new checks that our children’s futures cannot cash.

THE CHOICE BEFORE US

We stand at a terrifying crossroads. The 24.8 million-person question is whether we will, once again, ignore the warning.

The path we are on leads to a hollowed-out nation. A nation where a quarter of the population cannot participate in the modern economy. A nation where “informed citizenship” is a privilege for the few, not a right for all. A nation ripe for exploitation, unable to compete, and vulnerable to the whims of demagogues.

This is not an education crisis. This is a national security crisis.

But the solutions are not complex. They are, in fact, painfully simple. They do not require a new “revolutionary” curriculum or a trillion-peso budget for new tech.

They require subtraction. They require focus.

1. Liberate DepEd Leadership: Force them to resign from 250+ interagency bodies. Their one and only job is literacy.
2. Liberate Our Teachers: Ban all non-teaching tasks today. Let them teach.
3. Liberate the System: Impose a 5-year moratorium on new education laws. Make Congress fund the promises it has already broken.

We must choose. Do we want to be a nation that is excellent at holding meetings, or do we want to be a nation that knows how to read? Do we want our teachers to be world-class clerks, or world-class educators?

The 24.8 million are waiting for our answer.