When reform meets reality: DepEd is betting the classroom will hold

By Francis Allan L. Angelo

Ask anyone who sat in a Philippine public school classroom in the 1980s or early 1990s what they remember most, and the answer is rarely the lessons. It is the red ink. A 74 was a failure. There was no cushion, no transmutation table rounding you up, no administrative mercy. You either got the number or you did not. Many did not – and they left. Quietly, without ceremony, they simply stopped coming back, and the system barely noticed.

That memory matters now, because the Department of Education is, in effect, moving back toward that world. And this time, it is promising to do it better.

This is a reform year for Philippine basic education, and the ambition is genuine: a new grading standard; a three-term school calendar designed to dodge extreme heat; a stripped-down senior high curriculum; a PHP 10,000 teaching allowance doubled from the old chalk stipend.

We also have a Career Progression System that finally moved more than 100,000 teachers up the salary ladder, including 8,566 in Western Visayas alone, backed by PHP 6.1 billion.

Taken one at a time, nearly every piece of this is defensible. Together, on the first day of class in June 2025, they represent a system asking its most burdened workers and its most vulnerable learners to absorb everything at once – and a country that has been here before, with scars to prove it.

On June 4, DepEd Secretary Sonny Angara quietly signed Department Order No. 015. It raised the raw score a student must earn to transmute into a passing 75 from 60 to somewhere between 70 and 72.99. By School Year 2027-2028, the transmutation table disappears entirely. A raw score will simply be the grade. The congressional commission EDCOM 2 said as much in its findings: the old transmutation table laundered failing work into passing marks. A student who scored 60 walked out with a 75. The system called that a pass, which is a polite lie, and correcting it is the honest thing to do.

But those who grew up in the 1980s schoolhouse know where this road can lead. Before transmutation softened the edges, the Philippine classroom was already brutal by attrition. Dropout rates were not a policy abstraction — they were the empty desk where your neighbor sat in Grade 4 and was gone by Grade 6. The family needed hands. The grade was too far to close and the school offered no bridge. That generation survived, yes. Plenty of us made it through. But “we survived” is not the same as “the system worked.” The ones who didn’t survive rarely made the graduation photo.

A Grade 9 student in an overcrowded Iloilo public school, average effort, the type who used to just squeak through, may now fail subjects he would have passed last year on identical work. Multiply him by the hundreds of thousands across Region 6. Failing marks will climb. They are supposed to climb; that is what measuring honestly produces. But to a parent who never heard of DepEd Order No. 015, a spike in red marks sometimes lead to a quiet decision that the eldest is better off helping in the fields or the market stall — the same calculation families made in 1987 and 1993, made again in 2025.

So the urgent question for the department is not whether the new standard is right. It is whether the safety net is there this time. The ARAL program was supposed to answer that. The government pledged 440,000 tutors and PHP 8.9 billion to fund them. Teachers’ organizations report those tutors largely never arrived. The remediation got folded back onto advisers already managing six or more teaching loads with class sizes that routinely touch 50. Grading honestly without remediation in place is not progress. It is the 1980s classroom with better paperwork.

The enrollment picture in Western Visayas makes this more urgent. As of June 6, two days before opening day, the region had recorded 717,475 learners in public schools — roughly 73 percent of the more than 900,000 enrolled the year before. DepEd Region 6 information officer Hernani Escullar Jr. correctly noted that enrollment always runs late and the count would rise. Encoding lags are real. But a gap that wide, even if half of it evaporates when the data catches up, still points to tens of thousands of Ilonggo and Negrense children who have not come back.

The families who decide not to re-enroll do not file a notice. The child simply stops appearing, and the system marks the seat as pending encoding until it becomes a statistic nobody owns. This, too, is familiar. The invisible dropout of the 1990s was not the student who failed visibly and left in shame. It was the one who slipped away between terms, uncounted, unnamed, absorbed back into a household economy that needed the labor more than it needed the diploma. Escullar himself flagged the time pressure: a late enrollee who misses more than 20 percent of school days may not be able to catch up. The window is short. Barangay officials keep household lists. The Special Education Fund that local government units collect exists precisely for this. Iloilo City and the province have both the machinery and the budget to run a real-time enrollment sweep, purok by purok, over the next two weeks. Treating 73 percent as a search-and-rescue problem rather than a data-encoding delay is the minimum the moment requires.

Then there is the calendar. DepEd’s own rationale for moving to three terms is, if you read it carefully, a climate confession. The reforms are designed to make schools more responsive to typhoons, floods, extreme heat, and other emergencies. April 2024 made the case viscerally: a single heat wave closed 5,844 public schools and sent 3.6 million children home in one day. Western Visayas suspended classes in 536 schools. In the 1980s and 1990s, the school year was already hostage to the seasons — classes lost to floods, makeshift evacuation centers swallowing gymnasiums, teachers conducting lessons under corrugated roofs that amplified the rain. The difference is that today the department is naming the problem. Shifting the academic year to push the hottest months outside class time is sensible adaptation, whatever language the department uses for it.

The problem is that the new Term 2 runs from September to December, straight into typhoon season, with no clear protocol for the storms that will arrive on schedule. The calendar lifts summer heat out of the school year. It cannot lift out the typhoons. They will land in Term 2, and when they do, the same cascading suspensions that damaged the old calendar will damage the new one. EDCOM 2 already flagged this gap. A trimester schedule that does not also address drainage on flood-prone campuses, ventilation in classrooms that bake, and a pre-agreed make-up protocol is just a schedule. It moves the disruption from April to October.

Meanwhile, the people expected to make all of this work are being handed PHP 10,000 for markers. The Kabalikat sa Pagtuturo allowance is real money for supplies, and the career promotion wins are real and should be said plainly. But PHP 10,000 does not compensate for the evenings a teacher will burn this year learning four new systems at once. Those who taught through the 1990s curriculum shifts remember the exhaustion of revision cycles that arrived with no lead time and no training budget, just a new set of textbooks and an expectation that classroom practice would simply adjust. The cadence is familiar. The scale this year is larger.

To be fair, this is not the 1980s government. The Career Progression System actually moved people up. The allowance is twice what it was. The transmutation fix is overdue by a decade. These are not cosmetic gestures. But four structural changes arriving simultaneously, with the full weight of implementation falling on the classroom, is not a reform plan. It is a bet that the floor will hold — and the floor has failed before.

What the moment requires is honesty about the gaps. A one-page explainer in Hiligaynon and Filipino going home with every learner before October report cards, telling parents plainly that the ruler changed, not their child. Real-time failure tracking to push remediation into the schools where the new grading hits hardest. A barangay-by-barangay enrollment sweep before Term 1 is truly underway. A clear Term 2 storm protocol tied to actual make-up days, not just printed modules.

The reforms are a start. The children who walked away from the 1980s classroom without a diploma did not leave because the standards were too high. They left because there was nothing there to catch them. The question for DepEd in 2025 is whether it is finally ready to build that net before the grades come out, rather than after the desks go empty.