The World Education Services (WES), founded in 1974, the leading credential evaluation services provider in North America, in its World Education News + Reviews (WENR) of March 2018 about “Education in the Philippines,” provides a comprehensive and extensive review, and some of its findings were:
1. Many of the recent Philippine government education reforms “were adopted against a backdrop of declining educational standards in the Philippine education system during the first decade of the 21st century” which according to a Unesco mid-decade assessment report was due to chronic underfunding.
2. “The country’s youth literacy rate, while still being high by regional standards, fell from 96.6 percent in 1990 to 95.1 percent in 2003, making the Philippines the only country in Southeast Asia with declining youth literacy rates.”
3. “The Philippine government continues to spend less per student as a share of per capita GDP than several other Southeast Asian countries, the latest budget increases notwithstanding.”
4. “The Philippines keeps trailing other Southeast Asian countries in a variety of education indicators and the government has so far fallen short on a number of its reform goals.”
PH the only Southeast Asian country with declining literacy (msn.com)