EDITORIAL — Early learning crisis

Mass promotions of students and lowering of grading standards are being abolished. The best teachers are being assigned to Grades 1 to 3 in the public school system.

According to Department of Education Secretary Sonny Angara, these are among the moves being undertaken by DepEd to address the large number of struggling readers particularly in Grades 1 to 3.

Based on the end-of-school assessment for school year 2025-2026, the number was placed at 10 percent of 5,126,670 assessed pupils, according to the Second Congressional Commission on Education.

Child development experts have long stressed the importance of early childhood learning in future academic performance and capacities for dealing with life’s challenges. 

Together with writing and arithmetic, reading is a basic competency required for learning. How can a child struggling with reading understand lessons?

This impairment is likely to have been a problem for some time now. It’s little wonder that Filipino 15-year-olds showed dismal performance in reading comprehension, mathematics and science from the time the country began participating in 2018 in the Program for International Student Assessment.

PISA results for the country showed some improvement in its most recent participation in 2025, moving out of the bottom 10 rankings. But this is still low.

The lack of basic competencies is aggravated by school bullying. The country has earned the dubious distinction of being the bullying capital on the world.

In the early grades, poor reading comprehension has also been linked to mental and physical stunting due to poor nutrition. This is largely a problem associated with poverty. For many children, stunting starts at conception, with mothers themselves malnourished and unable to provide proper nutrition to life growing in the womb. Breast milk doesn’t last long, especially among malnourished mothers, and the cost of infant formula can be prohibitive for poor households.

The government has school feeding programs from play school to sixth grade. The programs help children, but pregnant women and new mothers can also use help in boosting their nutrient deficiencies.

All the ongoing and planned interventions need resources. Angara has pointed out that other countries pour substantial resources into education particularly in early childhood. The crisis in reading comprehension and education in general should guide the budgeting priorities of Congress.