Teachers have absorbed every education reform. EDCOM 2 needs to put them first.

A sixth-grade teacher in a public school tells me about a student she cannot forget: a 12-year-old in her class who couldn’t read. She wanted to refer the child to specialists for further support, but there was no one to refer to—no guidance counselor, no reading specialist, no one whose job it was to intervene. So she handled it herself, spending her lunch breaks working one-on-one with the child while her class of 32 waited. “Trabaho namin lahat,” she told me. Everything is our job.

She has been filling those gaps for 15 years. In conversations I had with several public school teachers, her story was not an exception.

Congress recently adopted the National Education and Workforce Development Plan 2026–2035, the final report of the Second Congressional Commission on Education. The plan is ambitious and credible with 20 priority recommendations, a P2.66 trillion investment target, and a goal of 90–95% reading proficiency by 2035. It deserves to be welcomed. But before we celebrate, we need to be honest about why past reforms failed, and why this promising plan risks repeating that pattern. Philippine education reform has always been better at redesigning the map than fixing the roads. And the road that matters most is the one teachers walk on every day.

The pattern has been consistent. K-12 promised a paradigm shift in teaching, but as one teacher I spoke with recalled, her cohort got a single seven-day training, and the next batch was taught by the same colleagues who had just attended it. The Magna Carta for Public School Teachers has capped classroom teaching at six hours per day since 1966; in August 2024, Secretary Angara announced he would strictly implement it. It was the same pledge his predecessors made, to the same effect. Salary hikes followed a similar arc, with nominal increases eroded by inflation. Through it all, the Philippines’ PISA scores barely moved, ranking 76th out of 81 countries in 2022.

That’s because the Philippines may not have a curriculum problem, but a teacher welfare crisis. Surveying nearly 15,000 teachers, EDCOM 2’s own policy brief found that the average Filipino public school teacher works 52 hours a week, with only 45% of that time spent on actual teaching. The rest goes to administrative work, government-mandated programs, and the accumulated demands of an underfunded system. The Alliance of Concerned Teachers has called this inhumane, noting that teachers in peer countries average 3-5 fewer teaching hours daily.

Consider what another teacher described to me. A STEM teacher at a public high school told me her day included teaching over 300 students across marathon double shifts, then handling census surveys, drug prevention seminars, cash transfer programs, and laboratory inventory. When teachers are expected to be nurses, counselors, and project managers, they cannot be great teachers. It is no wonder that over 21,000 teachers left DepEd between 2022 and 2023, and that the Philippines still lacks approximately 65,000 teachers.

Countries that have actually solved this problem didn’t start with curriculum redesign—they started with their teachers. Education researcher Lucy Crehan found a consistent pattern: Countries that perform best treat teachers as professionals. In Singapore, teachers complete 100 hours of annual professional development and follow a structured career ladder. In Canada, 63% of teachers feel their profession is valued by society, against a 26% OECD average. Good jobs produce motivated, self-sufficient teachers who have more time to innovate and improve student outcomes. The cycle is virtuous, but it begins only with teacher welfare.

EDCOM 2 is hardly blind to this. Its plan includes over 11,000 new administrative officer positions and a reduction of administrative forms from 174 to 75. Its defenders would say the plan is holistic by design, that you cannot fix teacher welfare without fixing governance, funding, and curriculum alongside it. They are not wrong, but comprehensive and prioritized are not the same thing. Teacher welfare appears as a bullet point among 20 recommendations, not as the explicit prerequisite that everything else rests on. The commission’s mandate was extended to oversee implementation precisely because this is where Philippine education reform tends to collapse.

If EDCOM 2 rolls out the way K-12 did, with curriculum redesigned, governance restructured, and teachers left to absorb the transition alone, the Philippines will spend P2.66 trillion and convene yet another commission in 2035 asking the same questions.

The teachers I spoke with need more than administrative relief. A second-grade teacher told me her purchasing power is barely better than it was fourteen years ago. The sixth-grade teacher spent her own money furnishing classrooms and covered a student’s emergency medical bill herself. The STEM teacher said her school needed a registrar. None of them has health insurance beyond what every Filipino receives. All three described career ladders blocked by favoritism and professional development that added to their workload rather than advancing their careers. This is a labor issue, and EDCOM 2 needs to treat it as one. Congress should demand a scorecard before the next budget cycle. Compensation, workload, and attrition improvements before proficiency scores.

“Trabaho namin lahat.” For decades, that has been a distress call. Now is the time to finally answer it.