DepEd welcomes Sonny Angara as secretary

The Department of Education (DepEd) on Tuesday welcomed Senator Sonny Angara as its incoming secretary. 

“The DepEd community looks forward to working with the new leadership as we continue our relentless pursuit towards improving the quality of Basic Education in the country,” DepEd said in a statement.

This came after the Presidential Communications Office (PCO) said President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. is "set to appoint" Angara to the post.

For his part, Angara vowed to work with all sectors of society to ensure that all Filipino students would have access to quality education.

He said he would also work with his predecessor, Vice President Sara Duterte, who resigned from her post on June 19. 

Her resignation will be effective on July 19.

Duterte previously said her resignation was not due to weakness but out of concern for teachers and students. 

Improved choice

In a separate statement, the Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) Philippines described Angara as a “much-improved choice.”

“ACT sees him as someone the alliance can work with,” it said.

The group stressed that the senator previously welcomed ACT’s request for dialogue and sought their positions on the education budget, teachers’ salaries, benefits and professional development, and measures for education recovery.

The alliance also expressed hope that Angara will remain amicable, saying that working as a lawmaker would be different from being a Cabinet member. 

“We anticipate seeing him asserting some of his progressive stance on education concerns even if they run counter to the administration’s policies that only exacerbate the education crisis,” it said.

House basic education panel chairperson and Pasig lawmaker Roman Romulo, for his part, expressed confidence that Angara will be able to stir urgent reforms in the Education department, particularly speeding up the implementation of the Matatag curriculum.

“We have in front of us the PISA results. The issue here is really reading comprehension and age-appropriate math and sciences. Matatag curriculum was introduced [in August 2023 to address that. But we saw in the recent academic calendar, the implementation of Matatag curriculum is much to be desired,” Romulo told reporters in a virtual press conference.

Romulo was referring to the the 2022 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results which showed that Philippines finished as the sixth lowest among the 81 countries and economies participating in the study which assesses student literacy.

“The Matatag curriculum was piloted in 35 DepEd schools, and we have about 38,000 DepEd elementary schools. You see, we need to be more aggressive in implementing the Matatag curriculum to address basic functional literacy. That is what we need,” Romulo added.

—with Llanesca T. Panti/ VAL, GMA Integrated News