Students who fail to demonstrate basic reading and math skills may no longer be automatically promoted under a sweeping reform agenda unveiled this week by the Second Congressional Commission on Education (EDCOM II), which is pushing for stricter standards on how learners move through grade levels.
In its final report submitted to Congress and released Tuesday, January 27, the commission urged the removal of practices that allow students to advance despite weak competencies, including the long-criticized use of grade transmutation and informal “mass promotion” in public schools. These recommendations form part of a 10-year National Education and Workforce Development Plan intended to reset how learning outcomes are measured across basic, higher, and technical education.
The commission’s findings show steep declines in reading proficiency as students progress through school. Based on Department of Education assessments cited in the report, only 30.52% of Grade 3 learners read at grade level, falling to 19.56% by Grade 6 and just 0.4% by Grade 12. By junior high school, a large majority of students are reading below expected levels.
“The report confirmed that mass promotion has become a systematic culture,” House Basic Education Committee Chairman and EDCOM II co-chair Roman Romulo said in a privilege speech.
Although mass promotion is not formally mandated by policy, EDCOM II found it is reinforced by performance metrics that reward schools for high promotion rates and penalize retention. To counter this, the commission recommended revising evaluation systems such as the Results-Based Performance Management System and protecting teachers’ professional judgment from what it described as institutional pressure.
Closely linked to this is the proposed rollback of grade transmutation, a policy that mathematically converts raw scores—sometimes as low as 40%—into passing marks. According to the report, this practice has obscured learning gaps and complicated intervention efforts. “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. EDCOM II set a target to phase out transmutation by school year 2027–2028 and replace it with criterion-referenced or descriptive grading systems.
