A TikTok video in support of a published article titled “Sara Blames Rallies for 2-M Drop in Enrollment” is misleading. The article involved Vice President Sara Duterte, concurrent Secretary of the Department of Education (DepEd).
TikTok user @panchorobredo23 reposted the article with the claim “Totoo yan, dinala sa lansangan ang mga kabataan kaysa mag enrol sa paaralan” (That’s true, the youths were brought to the streets instead of enrolling them in school).
In the caption, the TikTok user further accused partylist groups ACT Teachers, Kabataan and Gabriela for the drop in enrollment by plucking the children out from school and bringing them to the streets to dissent against the government.
Those partylist groups should not be voted in Congress in the next election, @panchorobredo23 urged.
However, the article that @panchorobredo23 reposted has been disputed by DepEd.
In a statement released on September 16, the agency condemned the article as “highly sensationalized, inaccurate, and misleading.”
“A perusal of the Vice President and Secretary of Education’s entire speech, delivered at the Peace Village on 11 September 2023, would show that at no point did she allude to rallies as being the reason for the alleged drop in enrollment,” the DepEd statement said.
The three-day Peace Village Exhibit was held at SM City Davao.
MindaNews covered the event and recorded the speech of Duterte, who did not mention rallies as the reason for the drop in school enrollment.
The DepEd statement noted that “a simple reading of the article itself would also reveal that nothing was uttered by Duterte, be it verbatim or by insinuation, to even remotely support the title’s conclusion.”
The Philippine STAR and OneNews.PH published the article on September 14.
On September 17, OneNews.PH published an article titled “Sara Did Not Blame Rallies For 2-M Drop In Enrollment.” In the report, the news organization said it had taken down the earlier article and that it wrote a follow-up story titled “DepEd, Not Rallies, To Blame For Low Enrollment – ACT.”
OneNews.PH is the online presence of OneNews, the all-news channel of Cignal TV and the synergy of the journalistic strengths of The Philippine STAR, philstar.com, TV5 Network Inc. and BusinessWorld under Mediaquest Holdings Inc, according to its website.
In its statement, DepEd clarified that the accurate enrollment number could not be determined at this time, noting that the encoding of students in the Learners Information System is still ongoing.
The total number of enrollees for School Year 2023-2024 will be known once the encoding period closes on 30 October 2023, the agency said.
As with all our other reports, MindaNews welcomes leads or suggestions from the public to potential fact-check stories.
MindaNews is a verified signatory to the Code of Principles of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN). (Miah Christine Bontillo / MindaNews)
