Let teachers teach? EDCOM II and the systemic roots of the education crisis

By Shan Kenshin Ecaldre

Cabuyao, LAGUNA—When the Second Congressional Commission on Education (EDCOM II) released its final report, it framed the country’s education crisis as a problem of teacher quality: Weak training, low competencies, and poor performance in licensure examinations.

The diagnosis was familiar. So were the prescriptions—stricter standards, tougher licensure, expanded professional development, and tighter performance metrics.

What remains unanswered, however, is whether the crisis truly begins and ends with teachers or whether the persistent focus on “teacher quality” obscures deeper structural failures of the Philippine education system.

For educators and education workers, the answer is clear: The crisis is systemic, and the repeated centering on individual teachers only shifts responsibility away from the State.

A system-wide failure, not individual incompetence

“The backbone of the education system is teaching and learning, but it is unjust to say that the crisis lies with individual teachers,” Jason Pozon of the All UP Academic Employees Union told Bulatlat “The problem is systemic—a deeply entrenched and widespread education system.”

Pozon pointed to chronic shortages in classrooms, learning materials, equipment, and student support services, conditions that shape teaching outcomes long before any licensure exam is taken. 

“Teacher quality is also shaped by the quality of life teachers are allowed to have,” he said. “How can quality education be delivered when teachers themselves are denied quality living conditions?”

Despite decades of reforms, from EDCOM I to K–12, the Philippine Professional Standards for Teachers (PPST), and the Continuing Professional Development (CPD) law, outcomes remain poor.

Passing rates in the Board Licensure Examination for Professional Teachers (BLEPT) averaged only 33% for elementary and 40% for secondary teachers between 2009 and 2023. EDCOM II treats these figures as evidence of inadequate teacher preparation.

But critics argue that such numbers reflect deeper neglect: underfunded schools, overcrowded classrooms, low salaries, and a training system detached from teachers’ realities, especially in public schools and rural areas.

Standards for whom?

EDCOM II proposes tighter alignment of pre-service education, licensure, and in-service training with performance standards.

On paper, these reforms promise “quality assurance.” In practice, teachers say they primarily serve bureaucratic compliance and institutional monitoring.

“These reforms do not reduce our burden, they add to it,” said Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) National Chairperson Ruby Bernardo. “Teachers remain overworked and underpaid. Standards are imposed without addressing low wages, understaffing, and excessive paperwork.”

Performance-driven policies, rankings, evaluations, CPD points, and targets have transformed schools into metric-oriented workplaces. 

Teaching is increasingly measured through output and documentation rather than meaningful learning relationships.

“When policies are market-oriented and performance-driven, teachers and students stop being treated as human beings,” Pozon said. “You demand higher output while providing less support. That contradiction is at the heart of the crisis.”

Training as compliance, and as business

While EDCOM II highlights professional development as a solution, teachers say CPD has become a source of pressure rather than support. 

“Professional development has been turned into a business,” Bernardo said. “Teachers pay for seminars just to comply, not because these trainings actually improve classroom practice.”

This model disproportionately burdens low-paid teachers and those assigned in remote or conflict-affected areas, where access to free, relevant training is limited. Planned moves to phase out “low-performing” teacher education institutions raise further concerns about access, particularly for students from poor and rural communities.

“What is being commodified is not just training, but the right to remain a teacher,” Pozon said.

Whose standards, whose context?

Teachers union and organizations point to the foreign orientation of many education reforms. Licensure frameworks, curricula, and competency standards are often modeled after systems in advanced economies, without regard for Philippine realities.

“K to 12 and teacher standards are Americanized, anchored in globalization and free trade,” Pozon said. “They assume conditions that do not exist here.”

As universities chase global rankings and benchmarks set by international financial institutions, education becomes detached from local needs. Teachers are trained to meet abstract competencies rather than respond to the material and cultural realities of Filipino learners.

What EDCOM II leaves out

While EDCOM II discusses training, standards, and staffing patterns in detail, teachers’ groups say it glosses over critical issues: chronic underfunding, low salaries, job insecurity, mental health, and academic freedom.

Education spending remains below the international benchmark of six percent of GDP. 

Overcrowded classrooms, shortages of support staff, and stagnant wages persist despite “historic” budget increases.

“Teachers’ health, safety, and dignity as workers are not side issues,” Bernardo said. “They are central to education quality.”

Absent, too, are the voices of teachers themselves. Union representatives and rank-and-file educators were largely excluded from the study’s composition, raising questions about whose expertise is being privileged in defining the crisis.

Education under repression

For education advocates in Mindanao, the omissions are even more glaring.

The Save Our Schools (SOS) Network criticized EDCOM II for failing to confront the closure of more than 200 Lumad community schools since 2015 and the criminalization of educators in cases such as the Talaingod 13.

“You cannot speak of education reform while Indigenous schools remain padlocked and teachers are convicted for protecting displaced children,” said Sr. Concepcion Gasang, SOS lead convenor.

Militarization, red-tagging, and lawfare, SOS said, have turned education and care into criminal acts, especially in Indigenous and rural communities where the State has long failed to provide schools.

“These are not side issues,” Gasang said. “They are central to the education crisis.”

A familiar conclusion

In the end, educators say EDCOM II offers little that is new. Its findings reiterate what teachers have long known, the education system is fragile, underfunded, and misaligned with Philippine realities.

What it fails to confront is the root cause, that education has been treated as a technical problem to be managed, rather than a public good to be fully funded, protected, and grounded in people’s needs.

“Education should not be a business,” Pozon said. “But today, teacher education and professional development generate profit for a few while teachers shoulder the cost.”

If reforms continue to focus on individual teachers while leaving structural injustices untouched, educators warn that the crisis will only deepen, leaving future generations without a truly functional public education system. (RTS)

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