Jaton Zulueta

Jaton Zulueta is challenging the public-school education system to deliver on its promise to leave no child behind by creating a network of citizen-powered learning journeys that are free, accessible, and responsive to the turbulent situations of low-income families.

Jaton unlocks the agency of students, families, and local communities to make quality and accessible education everyone’s responsibility. To share the mission of leaving no Filipino student behind, Jaton imbues a powerful mindset for all: every Filipino can learn and thrive given the right learning support, and any Filipino can be the support needed. Armed with this mindset, a network of parents, families, teachers, organizations, and institutions working with Jaton’s organization, AHA (Angels Here Abound) Learning Center are organizing around creatively problem-solving for the success and development of the public-school Filipino student.

He does this to address a root cause of the education inequity problem: the centralized, top-down, decision-making infrastructure in the Philippines which has left the learning journey and formation of Filipino children to schools and teachers, while parents and the community of a child are alienated from their role as active and valuable contributors. Compounded with the lack of an effective remediation strategy in the public education system, millions of public-school students are not receiving the support to catch up with their schooling.

Jaton is acting on three key strategies to create an effective ecosystem of support for all Filipino students: first, deepening their work with the disenfranchised students in AHA Prime and seeing over 300 students all the way through to college; second, widening the reach of AHA Plus by committing to train more parents, teachers, and adopting schools who can impart innovative teaching at the right level programs; lastly, Jaton is creating playbooks through AHA Mainstream that outlines AHA’s foundational literacy modules, socio-emotional teachings, and localized support programs that will be implemented by entire school divisions.

As evidence of the power of AHA’s network of changemakers, AHA Learning Center and its partners have created accessible and localized learning supports for over 3 million public school students and trained over 168,000 parents and teachers in beyond the school walls remediation methods. During the COVID-19, Jaton launched a text-based learning model called Eskwelang Pamilya and Tulong Eskwela which has been replicated nationwide and mitigated the frightening downward spiral of low-performing Filipino public-school students that seemed inevitable due to the longest pandemic induced school closure in the world. AHA has also replicated its approach to empowering parents to engage with their children’s learning through partnerships with schools, regional Department of Education offices, and leading private sector Corporate Social Responsibility arms. The results are that 3 out of the 5 public school students engaged with AHA’s programs have seen improvements in their grades, 95% of the parents who are active in the network report improvements in their child’s behavior, and 86% of parents felt more confident in teaching their children.

Four out of five Filipino students are considered “low-performers” in an OECD study published in 2019 . The Philippines is also the only Southeast Asian nation with a trend of declining literacy rates, with national and international aptitude tests ranking Filipinos as either lowest or among the lowest scorers in Reading, Writing, Math, and Science. As different dimensions and aspects of life become more tech-dependent, Filipino public-school students still struggle to cope with basic literacy skills and are projected to be ill-equipped for the fast-changing skill set required for the new jobs of the future.

Scholars and practitioners in the sector alike point to the problem of education inequity as a root cause of Filipino students’ low performance. There are economic, social, and cultural forces that create an imbalance in resources, opportunities, and the quality of learning. A glaring piece of evidence is the fact that access to private schools and public schools is segregated on the basis of socio-economic level and is almost caste-like; only poor families enroll their children in public schools and private schools are preferred by the affluent. In this sense, private school education has become aspirational for many Filipino families looking for a way out of poverty, leaving public schools to be seen as a lost cause and the last resort for only those considered the “least of society.” This inequity doesn’t stop at basic education—in fact, as of 2019, only 33% of public-school students gain admission into a university, and from that number, only 12% will attend. This is a grim outlook for the 23 million Filipino public-school students who comprise over 80% of the 28 million Filipino students enrolled in schools.

A key driver of the education inequity problem is that the Philippines has a centralized, top-down, decision-making infrastructure, wherein the Department of Education is responsible for rolling-out modules, programs, and other support mechanisms for public schools. This centralized model has inhibited the type of responsive, innovative, and grounded solutions needed to build equity in the system. Increasingly, the learning journey and formation of Filipino children are left to schools and teachers, while parents and the community raising a child are removed from their agency to participate and be involved. A key factor that contributes to the alienation of parents from their role as supporters is the social conditioning for parents to simply earn and pay for the best education they can and leave the teaching to the teachers. Many parents of public-school children also lack the self-confidence to engage in school affairs as a majority of them come from poor educational backgrounds.

The Covid19 pandemic further surfaced the deep-rooted inequality issues in the education system alongside an overly centralized decision-making process in public agencies that led to school closures for two years in areas with low to zero case rates. As digital learning became the immediate schooling measure, the lack of internet connectivity combined with limited access to technology and electronic devices meant that children from low-income families experienced difficulties keeping up with educational requirements. The situation caused about 72% of public-school students to discontinue their studies during the onset of the pandemic.

To create a responsive ecosystem of support addressing the turbulent reality of Filipino public-school students, Jaton organizes AHA’s strategy into three tiers: AHA Prime, AHA Community Plus and AHA Mainstream. The rationale for tiering is to ensure that no student is left behind with the different approaches that are responsive and adaptable. The different tiers also create different proofs of concept that can be transferrable to other key actors and effectively create the ecosystem of supports a child needs throughout their entire learning journey.

The first tier, AHA Prime is an after-school program for students in Tondo and Simlong, Makati, where a large population of disenfranchised urban poor youth are struggling to stay in school and cope with trauma. In AHA Prime, Jaton commits to delivering basic literacy skills, socio-emotional tools, and building the deep and sustained relationships needed to activate parents and the community to extend the learning support outside the centers. By teaching directly at the level each child is at, they are able to advance students and build their confidence in learning. Jaton leverages the evidence of transformation for children deemed “lost causes” to create more opportunities alongside other organization, such as the creation of Better World Communities. Jaton was able to co-design a pilot community funded and supported by San Miguel Corporation, the country’s oldest conglomerate, in Tondo where AHA supports over 300 students and 200 parents from the most marginalized backgrounds for an unlimited time period. The success of Better World Tondo spurred the offshoots of Better World centers in Cubao, EDSA, and Diliman. What makes Better World compelling is that Jaton brings in other organizations, not only his own, to join in and receive the advantages of funding and facilities provided by San Miguel. By doing this, each Better World center is unique—one acts as a food bank and soup kitchen, another as an accessible public health services center, and another as a hub and haven for low-income women to find livelihood and rehabilitation. San Miguel has now committed to making the Better World model their flagship Corporate Social Responsibility program and is planning to launch more Better World Communities in more locales. The model ensures that centers, where personalized and direct attention can be accessible to students who need it most, become a great equalizer in access to remediation programs nationwide.

The second tier, AHA Plus Community, focuses on training others in AHA’s methods to create accessible, quality, and relevant foundational and formational lessons. Jaton taps into traditional Filipino values such as filial piety and creativity to co-design 500+ modules and over 100 programs through volunteers and partners. These modules are created to always be free, localized, grounded in the reality of the students, and bite-sized enough to be easily adopted by any teacher, volunteer, and parent. These modules have already reached over 3 million Filipinos through the commitment to make them free and accessible. During the pandemic lockdown, AHA Learning Center became the first in the country to innovate and deploy modules through SMS, Facebook Free Messenger, and radio, which inspired the national government and other organizations to do the same. In addition, Jaton also targets adopting schools into AHA Plus by identifying and supporting 500 teachers in different school districts who have the creativity and commitment to developing novel solutions for unlocking parent engagement in education and advancing basic literacy and socio-emotional skills of students who are falling behind. These 500 teachers will also be influential in AHA’s strategy of reaching the 26,000 schools Jaton posits as the crucial number to tip the scales and change the local education system to become more responsive to the needs of students who are falling behind.

Lastly, AHA Mainstream is Jaton’s future strategy to transfer AHA’s methodology and mindset to key stakeholders who have the capacity to plug-and-play. By creating playbooks for school districts, organizations, and Corporate Social Responsibility arms, Jaton aims for AHA’s programs to be incorporated into local ordinances and practices. He is already building a base of collaborators to make this a reality—he is working with values-aligned organizations such as the Yellow Boat of Hope Foundation and Teach Anywhere, 11 school districts in the National Capital Region, Corporate Social Responsibility departments of San Miguel Foundation and Gokongwei Brothers Foundation, six Department of Education regional offices, and the AHA community of parents and teachers. The network in this tier of AHA will experiment and build further proofs of concept and recruit more quality implementers of free, accessible, and quality remedial education with the playbooks as a guiding and unifying thread.

In his youth, Jaton’s mother, a faith-driven business owner who used her hair business as a way to bring good to different communities, encouraged Jaton to volunteer by teaching at a graveyard where street kids used to live. Having struggled in math, Jaton had a deep sense of empathy for the out of school children who were falling behind in their classes and grades. When Jaton began teaching, he realized he wasn't bad at math but that he just wasn't being taught in a way he could excel. While balancing life as a college student, Jaton dedicated his free time and weekends to teaching at the graveyard.

In 2009, Jaton founded AHA Learning Center as an after-school tutorial program in Tondo, Makati. Inspired by his experience in volunteering with missionaries in the graveyard, he designed AHA’s volunteer program to work in periodic and open volunteering set-ups. AHA became more than a weekend tutoring program and became a true center for children, parents, families, and teachers to create deep transformations in themselves and give themselves self-permission to dream and be the change. As an after-school program, it went beyond the common models of tutoring and committed to staying long enough with the students to make a difference in their learning journey. During this period, Jaton worked on AHA in his spare time while earning his keep as a salesman for their family's hair business. In 2018, Jaton decided to commit his full attention to AHA before he and his wife started their family. With this idea in mind, Jaton and his wife agreed to invest more time and resources into developing AHA. AHA expanded and embarked on creative partnerships with companies, schools, agencies, and other organizations. It was during this time that Jaton gained recognition for his work and was awarded as a Ten Outstanding Young Men and Obama Foundation Fellow.

In 2020, when the pandemic struck, Jaton was dismayed—the lockdowns would mean more public-school students will be left behind. Acting quickly, he crowdsourced through his networks to look for people willing to do something, learning from what others were already doing, and for people willing to commit to creating solutions that reach as many students as possible. In just a month, Jaton was able to facilitate the citizenry’s power to create change—hundreds of Filipinos volunteered whatever they could—resources, time, skills—to create hundreds of modules, localize the modules to the major languages of the Philippines, train teachers and parents in delivering the text-based modules, and create safe spaces and learning communities.