Rejection of in-person classes needs full restudy

WE frankly do not understand why it is President Duterte who still makes the decision on whether classes during the current school year should be conducted virtually or in-person. We thought the reason why we have a huge Department of Education bureaucracy, and the biggest budget outlay for education, is to place in the hands of educators and specialists the responsibility for education, including classroom instruction and the school calendar. We want to spare the President from the nitty-gritty of making decisions on issues involving schooling or school enrollment.

It seems, however, that President Duterte cannot let go of education policymaking altogether.

Last Sunday, despite the delivery of donated Covid-19 vaccines from China, and the start of the vaccine rollout, which would have signaled a relaxation of the no-in-person classes policy, the President announced his rejection of a proposal for the resumption of face-toface classes in the country.

“Not now. I cannot make that decision. It will place the children in jeopardy,” he said at a press conference after the turnover ceremony of 600,000 doses of Sinovac vaccines at Villamor Air Base in Pasay City.

“I am not ready to lose the lives of our young people, our children. No,” he said when asked about the issue.

Earlier last month, Duterte thumbed down a similar proposal to resume in-person classes while the government’s mass immunization program against Covid-19 was still pending.

And earlier still, the President recalled his order allowing limited classes in some low-Covid areas because of the emergence of more infectious Covid-19 variants.

Many educators, parents and legislators will differ greatly with the President on his knee-jerk decision.

Many of them are concerned that students are unable to learn or retain much from the current modes of remote learning, especially for those who have no access to online classes.

The issue of whether Filipino pupils are actually learning in a remote setup is of concern to many as recent global assessments have shown that Filipino students are lagging behind their counterparts in other countries, especially our Southeast Asian neighbors, in academic performance.

Senate President Vicente Sotto 3rd said he would propose this week a resolution that would urge the executive department to resume face-to-face classes to allow the country’s educational system to catch up with our neighbors.

Our children and youth have been severely handicapped and slowed down by the disruption of classes during the pandemic. It is a fact that our students have been faring poorly in comparison with their counterparts in many other countries, particularly in Asia. The quality of Philippine education has been shown up repeatedly in international assessments. We have generally paid more attention to providing free access to education, up to the tertiary level, than to providing quality instruction and training.

Our perspective should change, particularly during this time of prolonged crisis.

It’s not right for the President to make decisions on in-person classes from the seat of his pants or on the run. He ought to constitute a group within his staff to really study the issue at length.

Conditions today are much different from the time when schooling was first disrupted by the pandemic. Now, there are safe and effective vaccines in place. We know more about Covid-19 than we did at this time last year. We know the population groups, which are most at risk. And children and youth have been shown to be at little risk of being infected by the virus.

Internationally, the outlook for schooling is even more positive. Governments are leveraging their resources to guide businesses and schools toward safely reopening and keeping them open. The harm to children from school closures are too great for them to accept any other outcome.

While the lockdown and community quarantine may have been justified at the start when little data was known, we know far more about the virus today, and we now have the means to beat it.

It is in this light that the in-person classes question should be resolved.

It’s time we really use all we have learned and all we have done to reopen our schools and our economy safely and get back to normal.