Gov’t urged to close down non-performing education schools

MANILA, Philippines - A group of education reform advocates called on the government to close down weak-performing teacher education institutions (TEIs) following the low-passing rates in the licensure examination for teachers (LET) in the past five years.

Based on a study conducted by the Philippine Business for Education (PBEd), 601 (59 percent) of TEIs for elementary education and 795 (63 percent) of TEIs for secondary education performed below their respective national passing rates from October 2009 to September 2013.

A big chunk of these weak-performing TEIs are private non-sectarians (55 percent), followed by state universities and colleges (27 percent), private sectarian (13 percent) and local colleges and universities (5 percent), the PBEd bared.

PBEd also said 129 TEIs in elementary and 147 TEIs in secondary had less than 20 percent LET passers. Seventeen TEIs even had zero passers for both first time takers and repeaters of the last five years.

The research showed that only eight out of 16 (54 percent) of test-takers pass the LET on their first try and only 16 percent of repeaters pass the examination.