FOR YEARS, teachers, parents, and school heads have lived inside this quiet fiction: promotion rates are above 95% while national assessments reveal an entirely different story. Our learners cannot read, cannot compute, and cannot comprehend at the levels expected of them
The latest Turning Point report by Second Congressional Commission on Education (EDCOM 2) tears the veil off this illusion. Only 30.5% of Grade 3 learners can read at the expected proficiency level. By Grade 12, that number plunges to 0.40%, which is not even one out of every 200 students. We are not just witnessing learning gap but the slow erosion of our children’s futures, one grade level at a time.
And yet, year after year, we promote them anyway.
Parents who insist that their children must move up – “Tutu pu kasing makarine,” “Tukyan nala pu reng ka-edad na,” or “Bangkanita eya pu malakwan” – may not realize how much harm this causes. Theirs is not an act of love but an act of delay. When will they realize that promotion without mastery is a quiet cruelty?
A child who cannot read in Grade 3 will drown in Grade 6, and by the time they reach junior high, school has become a daily humiliation masked by silence. Many eventually drop out, not because they are lazy, but because the system pushed them forward without equipping them to survive.
The cost of repeating a grade is small; the cost of not learning is lifelong.
Teachers know this too intimately. Many hesitate to give failing grades not because the child does not deserve an honest assessment, but because the paperwork, justifications, interventions, and the blame all fall on them. “Human consideration” is too often used as a shield to protect the adults in the system rather than the learners themselves. True compassion is not about passing students; it is about helping them succeed.
School heads carry another burden. Their performance ratings depend on promotion, completion, and graduation statistics. Every retained student is a red mark. In such a distorted environment, telling the truth about student performance becomes an administrative risk. Mass promotion becomes a survival instinct, not an educational choice.
Ending mass promotion, as EDCOM 2 now urges, is necessary. But let’s be brutally honest: it will not fix the crisis by itself.
The roots of this catastrophe sink deeper into overcrowded classrooms, curriculum overload, teacher shortages, lost instructional time, poverty, and the absence of strong early literacy programs. We need more than a policy change. We need structural courage.
Ending mass promotion is the first honest step.
But rebuilding trust in our education system and giving every child the dignity of real learning will take far more than simply moving students up or down. It will require a nation finally willing to confront uncomfortable truths and choose long-term solutions over short-term appearances.
Our children deserve more than promotion. They deserve preparation; the kind that gives them a real future, not just a report card.
