A World Bank report titled “Prioritizing Learning During COVID-19: The Most Effective Ways to Keep Children Learning During and Post-Pandemic” warned that “without large-scale, effective and swift government action, the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on education [would] be catastrophic for children in low-income and middle-income countries.”
As the WB pushed for the full opening of schools while reducing COVID-19 transmission in academic institutions to address learning poverty aggravated by the prolonged pandemic, Socioeconomic Planning Secretary and concurrent head of the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) Karl Kendrick Chua said the full opening of schools would be doable in the country.
During the last quarter of 2021, the Department of Education was able to pilot in-person classes in selected areas with relatively low infections. However, the current surge of COVID-19 cases due to the Omicron variant has forced schools to shut down again.
As the Philippines struggles to reopen its schools that have mostly been closed for more than two years, World Bank estimates show that learning poverty in the Philippines, or the share of 10-year-olds who cannot read nor understand a simple story, had hit a high of 90 percent as school children struggled with online and remote classes.
Before the pandemic, learning poverty in the country was already high at 69.5 percent.
The new WB report recommended to “prioritize keeping schools and preschools fully open,” even as it noted that “at the end of 2021, some school systems are still fully closed, and many are only partially open, while the spread of the Omicron variant threatens further restrictions.”
“As governments make tough choices about what activity to restrict in the face of new variants, the evidence suggests education must be prioritized: general economic activity has often recovered rapidly as lockdowns ease, but school closures have caused large and persistent damage to children’s education and future productivity, which is hard to address,” it said.
Education Secretary Leonor Briones has been urged to address areas of noncompliance and prepare a transition plan for the reopening of public schools by the middle of the year for the new administration. Online school and remote schooling was supposed to be a stopgap solution that has been allowed to become practically permanent in the Philippines.
Pandemic or none, our DepEd needs to rediscover its sense of urgencywhen it comes to facing the problem of learning poverty which can be addressed with a plan to ensure the reopening of schools all over the country as soon as it is safely possible.*
