01/11/2025
The Second Congressional Commission on Education (EDCOM 2) expressed alarm over the Department of Education’s (DepEd) involvement in over 200 interagency bodies, which supposedly diverted the agency from addressing “functional illiteracy.”
The EDCOM 2 recently conducted a hearing on the charter and mandates of DepEd, during which Education Secretary Sonny Angara disclosed that the department currently sits in 261 interagency bodies, chairing at least 20, and attending 21 jointly with the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) and the Technical Education Skills Development Authority (TESDA).
The EDCOM 2 said this was a “huge leap” from the 63 bodies it originally reported in its Year One Report, “Miseducation: The Failed System of Philippine Education.”
During the hearing, the body emphasized how the trifocalization of what used to be the Department of Education, Culture and Sports (DECS) in 1994 to establish the three education agencies —DepEd, CHED, and TESDA, “was primarily intended to enable DepEd to concentrate on addressing students’ functional literacy.”
“In 1993, the first Congressional Commission on Education underscored the need to enable the agency to focus solely on basic education to address the 14.5 million functionally illiterates in the 1990s,” the EDCOM 2 said.
“However, 30 years later, despite the restructuring of education agencies, the number of functional illiterate Filipinos almost doubled to 24. 8 million,” it said, citing the revised definition of functional illiteracy in the 2024 Functional Literacy, Education and Mass Media Survey (FLEMMS).
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