WHY DOES it always come as a surprise to us whenever the Philippines scores low in the Programme for International Students Assessment (PISA) rating system of the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD)?

Is there no way of tracking, monitoring and reporting the performance of students nationwide, such that we will no longer be surprised whenever the PISA ratings would come out?

In the latest PISA ratings, the Philippines ranked number five from the bottom with a score of 353 among a field of 81 participating countries and economies.

The topnotcher is Singapore with 560 points, followed by Macau with 535 points, Taiwan with 533 points, Japan with 533 points and South Korea with 523 points.

Come to think of it, Macau is not even a country, but how did they manage to score so high?

To answer my own question, yes, there are software that are available for the purposes of tracking, monitoring and reporting the performance of students.

The software is often called a Learning Management System (LMS), and some versions are in the category of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), meaning that you do not have to pay for anything if you decide to use it, not unless you choose to avail of optional consulting and training services.

Although there could be many ways of measuring the performance of Ministers of Education in all countries, what could be a better measure than the performance of their students in the PISA scores?

The appointed Ministers may have all the doctoral degrees to their names, or they could be the most popular persons in their own countries, but what good is that if their PISA scores are low?

Of course, LMS is necessary and I think it should even be required for mandatory use in all school levels.

But right now, the more important question is how to improve the test scores of students, so that our PISA rankings will go up.

If the students are not learning as they should, maybe the Department of Education (DepEd) is not teaching them as they should?

What are they doing right, and what are they doing wrong? Since the proof is in the pudding, why not find out? There is only one way to tell.Ike Señeres