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MANILA, Philippines — Students who cannot read or do basic math may soon be held back from advancing to the next grade level, according to a congressional commission's decade-long plan publicized this week to address the country's wide-ranging education crisis.
The Second Congressional Commission on Education (EDCOM II) also called for phasing out grade transmutation policies that convert failing marks into passing scores, a practice that has allowed students to move up without absorbing the skills expected of their level, according to its final report submitted to Congress on Monday and shared Tuesday, January 27.
These two points are among several recommendations contained in EDCOM II's 10-year plan — a sprawling 600-page document that maps out how to fix Philippine education from preschool to college.
The plan was written by a group of lawmakers and education experts who spent three years studying what's gone wrong in the country's schools. Their evaluations were made after speaking to several teachers and students, consulting officials from the three main education agencies and commissioning over 100 independent research publications on how and why Filipino children keep falling behind their regional peers.
Congress created the commission in 2022 to figure out how to address the learning crisis exposed and worsened by the pandemic. The group's job was to come up with a roadmap with clear targets and deadlines for the Department of Education (DepEd), the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) and the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA).
It is the country's first decadal roadmap in recent history designed to replace the government's more recent, fragmented, short-term education plans. It is a strategy sequenced over three milestones: 2028, 2031, and 2035.
EDCOM II will not oversee its National Education and Workforce Development Plan from start to finish, but it has been granted a two-year extension to accompany the country through initial steps of reform until the end of 2027.
This means the plan's success will largely depend on the next two administrations after the Marcos administration concludes in 2028. But the commission has laid out specific, measurable targets that the government can be held accountable to, including two key reforms that target how students are assessed and promoted through the system.
Ending 'mass promotion'
The practice of mass promotion is described as unofficial or "de facto" because no DepEd policy formally mandates automatic promotion of students who habitually flunk classes.
While not an official policy, mass promotion is reinforced anyway by pressures on teachers and school heads to maintain high promotion rates and low retention rates. EDCOM II has captured this phenomenon extensively.
The commission found that only 30.52% of Grade 3 learners read at grade level, dropping to 19.56% by Grade 6 and plummeting to just 0.4% by Grade 12, based on Department of Education assessments. By the time students reach Grade 7, 88% are struggling to read at that level, with 40% to 52% of all junior high school students reading at least two grade levels below where they should be.
"The report confirmed that mass promotion has become a systematic culture," House Basic Education Committee Chairman and EDCOM II Co-Chair Roman Romulo said during his privilege speech Monday.
These findings, for EDCOM II, show the "severe challenges faced by learners as they move across grade levels: highlighting the possible consequences of 'mass promotion' practices, and once again, stressing urgent reforms demanded to ensure mastery of foundational literacy."
How to reverse this? Besides changing the grading system to focus less on grades and more on mastery of lessons, EDCOM recommends phasing out the conditions that make schools promote all students by default in the first place.
The commission called for revisions to the Results-Based Performance Management System and the Office Performance Commitment and Review Form, warning that current metrics encourage schools to minimize failures or inflate grades.
It also said teachers’ professional judgment in deciding student promotion must be protected, with safeguards to ensure decisions are not driven by "institutional pressure."
Phasing out grade transmutation
Another recommendation closely tied to mass promotion is the proposed rollback of grade transmutation, a grading policy EDCOM II says has weakened learning standards.
The commission urged that the policy be rescinded alongside the end of mass promotion, arguing that both have created a system where years spent in school no longer guarantee actual learning.
Grade transmutation applies mathematical formulas to raw test scores, allowing students who score as low as 40% on an exam — normally a failing mark — to receive a passing grade after conversion.
While the system was originally meant to standardize grading across schools, EDCOM II said it has instead masked poor performance and allowed students to advance without mastering basic competencies.
This has hurt the government's efforts in helping students catch up with lessons, according to the report.
"Teachers report that this practice makes it difficult to justify additional remediation, to flag learners for referral to ARAL or BBMP, or to explain to parents why a child who appears to be 'passing' is still unable to read independently or handle basic mathematics," the report stated.
"For the system as a whole, these grading practices inflate reported achievement, distort school and division level data, and weaken the evidence base on which curriculum reform, learning recovery programs, and promotion policies are meant to rest," EDCOM II said.
The commission set a target to phase out the transmutation policy by SY 2027–2028.
In place of the transmutation table, the commission recommended adopting descriptive or criterion-referenced grading.
The Philippine school system, EDCOM II added, should stop using evaluations to punish schools for having failed students and start using them to provide schools with the specific funding and training they need.
The dropout dilemma
For years, schools have also opted to promote students who flunk their classes due to the documented phenomenon of learners simply opting to drop out instead of repeat a year.
Mass promotion is ultimately teachers’ response to avoid “further disadvantaging individuals who don’t have resources to begin with," Eos Trinidad, an education sociologist and professor at the University of California Berkeley, told Philstar.com in an interview for a 2023 special report on the practice of mass promotion.
Approximately 41.9% of students who enter Grade 1 do not complete their education by Grade 10, according to DepEd data shared in 2023.
This reality is also discussed in the report. EDCOM II noted that causes of underperformance often lie outside the classroom, such as frequent absenteeism, child labor, and unstable caregiving, all of which contribute to learners falling behind and eventually dropping out.
The commission proposes that ending mass promotion must be paired with strong remediation programs like ARAL, which provides free tutoring.
"DepEd remediation efforts like the Bawat Bata Makababasa Program (BBMP) and the Literacy Remediation Program (LRP) in May 2025 have demonstrated that structured, targeted, and time-bound interventions can move the learners that are furthest behind," the
