AFTERMATH OF THE COVID-19

PANDEMIC ON THE QUALITY

OF EDUCATION IN THE PHILIPPINES
AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES

Or

Assessing the Post-COVID Landscape: A Comparative Study of Education Quality in the

Philippines and Global Contexts
 CASES

LOCAL

CASE 1
17-year-old Ruzel Delaroso needs to ask her teacher a question, she can’t simply raise
her hand, much less fire off an email from the kitchen table. She has to leave the
modest shack that her family calls home in Januiay, a farming town in the central
Philippines, and head to an area of dense shrubbery, a 10-minute walk away. There, if
she’s lucky, she can pick up a phone signal and finally ask about the math problem in
the self-learning materials her mother picked up from school.

“We’re so used to our teachers always being around,” Delaroso tells TIME via the same
temperamental phone connection. “But now it’s harder to communicate with them.”

Her school, Calmay National High School, is among the tens of thousands of Philippine
public schools shuttered since March 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and
Delaroso is one of 1.6 billion children affected by worldwide school closures, according
to a UNESCO estimate.

But while other countries have taken the opportunity to resume in-person classes, the
Philippines has lagged behind. After 20 months of pandemic prevention measures,
amounting to one of the world’s longest lockdowns, only 5,000 students, in just over 100
public schools, have been allowed to go back to class in a two-month trial program—a
tiny fraction of the 27 million public school students who enrolled this year. The
Philippines must be one of a very few countries, if not the only country, to remain so
reliant on distance learning. It has become a vast experiment in life without in-person
schooling.

CASE 1
JIRO A. NOBLE, 14, has been trying to learn Algebra on his own since classes started
in October amid a coronavirus pandemic. The Grade 9 student from Batangas National
High School finds self-learning convenient in the absence of classroom noise and other
distractions. But he finds it difficult to understand complex Math lessons without a
teacher.
“I need a teacher because it takes me days to understand a lesson,” he said in Filipino
by telephone.

Jiro’s father works as a driver, while his mom is a housewife. He has seven siblings, two
of whom are also studying online. One is in senior high school, while the other has just
started college and he would tap them whenever he needs help.

The COVID-19 crisis has forced school closures in almost 200 countries, disrupting the
learning process of more than 1.7 billion children, according to the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Most governments including the Philippines were forced to adopt distance-learning

solutions to ensure education continuity, and much of the debate focuses on how much
students have learned (or missed) during school closures.

CASE 3

MANILA — As jubilant students across the globe trade in online learning for classrooms,
millions of children in the Philippines are staying home for the second year in a row
because of the pandemic, fanning concerns about a worsening education crisis in a
country where access to the internet is uneven.

President Rodrigo Duterte has justified keeping elementary schools and high schools
closed by arguing that students and their families need to be protected from the
coronavirus. The Philippines has one of the lowest vaccination rates in Asia, with just 16
percent of its population fully inoculated, and Delta variant infections have surged in
recent months.

That makes the Philippines, with its roughly 27 million students, one of only a handful
of countries that has kept schools fully closed throughout the pandemic, joining
Venezuela, according to UNICEF, the United Nations Agency for Children. Other
countries that kept schools closed, like Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, have
moved to reopen them.

“I cannot gamble on the health of the children,” Mr. Duterte said in June, rejecting
recommendations by the health department to reopen schools.

CASE 4

The continuing casualty of the Covid-19 pandemic is children’s education. The

Philippines was one of five countries that failed to immediately start in-person schooling
when the pandemic began. The United Nations International Children’s Fund (UNICEF)
said that 27 million students were affected. Unicef laments that while classes resume in
most parts of the world, schools in the Philippines remain closed. It noted that in 2020,
schools globally were fully closed for an average of 79 teaching days. Schools in the
Philippines, however, remained closed for more than a year, and when classes
resumed, three modalities were executed: modular distance learning, online distance
learning and TV or radio-based instruction.

Most parents and students chose online and modular learning. However, problems
became apparent when the majority of students lacked the appropriate gadgets, like
cellphones and laptops, for online learning. Some local government units, such as
Quezon City, provided tablets for students in need who were required to return the
units after the school year. The telcos were not ready to accommodate the upsurge of
users, and there was a lack of signals in many urban and rural areas. On the other
hand, modular distance learning required the printing and distribution of modules,
which made parents nervous due to the aggravating pandemic.

CASE 5

A child's first day of school—a landmark moment for the youngest students and their
parents around the world—has been delayed due to COVID-19 for an estimated 140
million young minds, UNICEF said in a new analysis released as summer break comes
to end in many parts of the world.

The Philippines is one of the five countries in the world that have not started in-person
classes since the pandemic began, affecting the right to learn of more than 27 million
Filipino students. While new variants are causing a rise of infections, UNICEF is
advocating for a phased reopening of schools, beginning in low-risk areas. This can be
done on a voluntary basis with proper safety protocols in place.

"The first day of school is a landmark moment in a child's life—setting them off on a
life-changing path of personal learning and growth. Most of us can remember countless
minor details—what clothes we wore, our teacher's name, who we sat next to. But for
millions of children, that important day has been indefinitely postponed," said UNICEF
Executive Director Henrietta Fore. "As classes resume in many parts of the world,
millions of first graders have been waiting to see the inside of a classroom for over a
year. Millions more may not see one at all this school term. For the most vulnerable,
their risk of never stepping into a classroom in their lifetime is skyrocketing."

For an estimated eight million students around the globe—who should have been in the
first grade— the wait for their first day of in-person learning has been over a year and
counting, as they live in places where schools have been closed throughout the
pandemic.

The first grade sets up the building blocks for all future learning, with introductions to
reading, writing, and math. It's also a period when in-person learning helps children
gain independence, adapt to new routines, and develop meaningful relationships with
teachers and students. In-person learning also enables teachers to identify and address
learning delays, mental health issues, and abuse that could negatively affect children’s
well-being.
“In 2020, schools globally were fully closed for an average of 79 teaching days, while
the Philippines has been closed for more than a year, forcing students to enroll in
distance learning modalities. The associated consequences of school closures –
learning loss, mental distress, missed vaccinations, and heightened risk of drop out,
child labour, and child marriage – will be felt by many children, especially the youngest
learners in critical development stages,” UNICEF Philippines Representative
Oyunsaikhan Dendevnorov says.
 REFERENCES

https://time.com/6124045/school-closures-covid-education-philippines/
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/13/world/asia/philippines-students-remote-covid.html
https://www.bworldonline.com/editors-picks/2021/02/01/341918/coronavirus-pandemic-
highlights-failures-of-philippine-education/
https://www.pna.gov.ph/opinion/pieces/704-addressing-effects-of-covid-19-among-
filipino-learners
https://www.unicef.org/philippines/press-releases/filipino-children-continue-missing-
education-opportunities-another-year-school
17-year-old Ruzel Delaroso needs to ask her teacher a question, she can’t simply raise
her hand, much less fire off an email from the kitchen table. She has to leave the
modest shack that her family calls home in Januiay, a farming town in the central
Philippines, and head to an area of dense shrubbery, a 10-minute walk away. There, if
she’s lucky, she can pick up a phone signal and finally ask about the math problem in
the self-learning materials her mother picked up from school.
“We’re so used to our teachers always being around,” Delaroso tells TIME via the same
temperamental phone connection. “But now it’s harder to communicate with them.”
Her school, Calmay National High School, is among the tens of thousands of Philippine
public schools shuttered since March 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and
Delaroso is one of 1.6 billion children affected by worldwide school closures, according
to a UNESCO estimate.
But while other countries have taken the opportunity to resume in-person classes, the
Philippines has lagged behind. After 20 months of pandemic prevention measures,
amounting to one of the world’s longest lockdowns, only 5,000 students, in just over 100
public schools, have been allowed to go back to class in a two-month trial program—a
tiny fraction of the 27 million public school students who enrolled this year. The
Philippines must be one of a very few countries, if not the only country, to remain so
reliant on distance learning. It has become a vast experiment in life without in-person
schooling.