You don’t expect a politician to be an introvert, especially one who’s been in politics for over two decades. But the first thing Education Secretary Sonny Angara tells Rolling Stone Philippines is that he is an introvert. And it’s a claim substantiated when he fiddles with a blue ballpoint pen and shifts in his ergonomic chair as if never satisfied with his current position.
Juan Edgardo “Sonny” Manalang Angara started his political career in 2004 when he was elected as Representative of Aurora Province. After serving three terms in Congress, he ran for senator in 2013 and kept a Senate seat until July 2024, when he was appointed secretary of the Department of Education.
But his exposure to politics goes back to his childhood, being the son of former Senator Edgardo Angara. His father was mostly involved in the sectors of law and education, running Angara Abello Concepcion Regala & Cruz Law Offices and serving as president of the University of the Philippines (UP) before becoming one of the longest-serving senators in the country. The younger Angara would eventually follow a similar career trajectory, studying law before entering the government.
He admits that the opportunity for public service came sooner than he expected, as he had planned a longer career in law. “I think there were political races and they were looking for candidates,” he says of his first race for Congress. “I think I was one of those considered.”
So, for a large part of his career, the younger Angara looked to his father for guidance. But as a former legislator and now DepEd secretary, he has also come to value his learnings from elsewhere.
In this interview, Angara discusses everything he’s learned about politics, from his father to his experiences in the political arena.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
What did your father aim for as a lawmaker and what makes that so important for you now in your own political career?
I think wherever my dad went, he always aimed for lasting and systemic change — meaning not surface changes, but real changes and real transformation. Transformation with the aim of empowering people. That was his life goal. And for him, based on his life as someone from the province, who went to public schools, and who succeeded in life, he really believed in the power of education. He also communicated that very well to us because growing up, he wouldn’t really give us everything we wanted. But if it was books, or if we asked for support for other forms of study, it was very easy to ask for.
That’s something that you also aim for now?
Definitely. I think it’s what he aimed to provide to every Filipino, really: the opportunity. He would often tell me, “You know, me, I just worked hard and someone always took care of my tuition, whether it was the government or some benefactor.” So parang pinagyayabang niya na never siya nagbayad ng tuition sa buhay niya, and yet he became successful. So parang that philosophy he’s trying to tell me, “In public life, you have to open doors for a lot of people. Because doors were opened for me.” And what policy opens the most doors? It’s education.
Did you already know then, studying law, that you would venture into governance like your father?
It occurred to me at some point that maybe I might want to enter politics later on, but not as soon as I did. The opportunity to enter politics came much sooner than I expected. I finished law in 2000, I entered politics early in 2004. I was thinking more like a decade or two down the line, much like my father, pero there was an opportunity, which presented itself in 2004.
What did you learn about the legislative process from your time in Congress?
It can be very fast, it can be very slow. Most of the time, it’s slow and grinding. There’s a lot of effort involved and a lot of people. It’s a great process, it’s really democracy at work. It’s tough. It requires a lot of deep study. There’s that saying of [Otto von] Bismarck, the German [chancellor]: “Laws are like sausages. It’s better to not see them being made.” You want to see the result, but you don’t want to see it being made because there’s so much jockeying or compromise that comes into play.
Some of the most important laws you authored are the Magna Carta for Women and the Anti-Bullying Law, and it’s hard to imagine that these laws weren’t around prior to being passed. How do you close those gaps in legislation? What are lawmakers missing or overlooking?
Good oversight is really valuable, oversight on how laws are implemented, because sometimes there’s a gap between conception and implementation. I think it’s happening right now in education because we have very strong oversight by [the Second Congressional Commission on Education], but it doesn’t always happen in different areas of legislation. I think that’s something that should be pursued.
Our political system kasi depends on that e, that the ideas come from Congress but the implementation comes from the Executive. In other countries — most countries in Asia — these processes are married because you have a parliament, so the guys who pass the laws are also the guys who implement them. The gap between the idea and reality is smaller. In the Philippines, it can be quite wide, so that’s something we should strengthen.
To be a good legislator, you have to be willing to put in the work and admit that you don’t know a lot and learn from the experts.
What did you learn from your constituency as the Aurora representative? How did you balance those duties to your constituency and your duties concerning national affairs?
I really enjoyed my time as Aurora representative because Aurora’s a great place. It’s not that big. It’s eight towns, 200,000 people. But for me, that was the real Philippines. Metro Manila is not the real Philippines. In a way it is, because it’s urban, but looking back, most of the Philippines looks like Aurora: barangays, a lot of families, community life, agricultural, not quite industrialized, but a lot of potential. What we do in places like Aurora will determine our destiny as a nation.
What challenges did you face when you started your first term as Senator in 2013? How is that different from your work in the House of Representatives?
I was a very busy first-term senator because I chaired two committees as a newcomer: Sports and Ways and Means, which is taxes. That’s a very demanding committee. We would have an eight-hour hearing sometimes with 50, 60 people. The process of legislation is not always pretty to watch. It’s painstaking, it’s detail-oriented. And it so happened that I was also vice-chair to a lot of committees, and then Senator Jinggoy [Estrada was] detained in Camp Crame, so I took over the Labor Committee. Senator Miriam [Defensor-Santiago] was sick with cancer, so I would also chair the Foreign Relations Committee. I loved doing the work and it really molded me as a legislator and made me very well-rounded.
What did you love about the work you did as a senator?
Talking to a lot of people and learning. For me, legislation is also learning. To be a good legislator, you have to be willing to put in the work and admit that you don’t know a lot and learn from the experts. But again, being a senator, you have access to the best minds, whether they’re your consultants or the experts who you consult on the committee. I think that’s part of the joy or privilege of being a legislator. Not everyone realizes that privilege. Not everyone capitalizes on it. But it’s something that is there and it’s available.
Did you think that you were equipped to face challenges, given not only your experience as a congressman but also because you, perhaps, were guided by your father?
For sure. I think, in terms of the political jockeying, in terms of the motivations of actors, I learned a lot just watching my father at work. And of course, for the formal stuff, for the training, UP, Xavier, and the London School of Economics prepared me very well for the job. But again, you still have to learn. When you chair a Senate or a House committee, there’s a lot of work involved. You have to also get good staff. You have to also consult the right people. You have to put in the work also.
You started your tenure as education secretary at the height of the controversy surrounding the DepEd budget. What was it like coming into this role and immediately being faced with that? And what were your immediate goals when you were appointed?
It was a very busy time because [when] we came in [sometime in July], we had [a few weeks] to present the budget to the House of Representatives. A lot of challenges. We had fallen behind in terms of education. But thankfully, I was part of the Congressional Commission on Education and there were a lot of resources at our disposal in terms of knowing what the problems were and knowing what some of the solutions were. We hit the ground running. And we didn’t have to go back to zero so to speak and analyze problems. We had the privilege of experts telling us.
Of course, it’s different when you see it firsthand. But again, we have to strengthen the basics. Kindergarten to grade three is what they call key stage one, the foundation for everything. You hear employers saying, “The employees now, they can’t communicate or we have to teach them how to communicate,” or, “They have such a bad attitude. They don’t want to work.” The colleges sometimes tell us we have to do remediation. We have to teach basics in science. So again, that can all be traced back to what you teach in kindergarten and grade three and how you teach it.
Another goal of ours is not just to strengthen the foundation but also make people love learning on their own. Especially in the way the world works now, you don’t stay in one job. You have several jobs, several gigs at one time. So all of these will require you to kind of encounter some learning curve and improve yourself, your skills.
That’s the one lasting contribution we can really make: strengthen the foundation, but also that innate love for learning within every individual. You can activate that. You can light that fire.
What are you learning about the country’s education system and policies?
I think we have very smart, adaptable people — not just students, but also teachers. But I found it [to be] a very 20th-century organization. A lot of systems [are] not very efficient, very centrally run. We’re huge. We have 45,000 schools. We have 800,000-plus teachers. We have 23, 24 million students. And yet, it’s only a few people determining policies here in Pasig. So we’re really looking at a lot of decentralization, empowering schools. Sometimes they want to buy something, they have to ask the central office. The paper gets routed, it takes so long, then the decision is made.
So by the time the decision is made to buy that thing, it’s not needed anymore, or they want something else. Things like that, very basic ground-level decisions. We want to look at really empowering schools.
That’s the one lasting contribution we can really make: strengthen the foundation, but also that innate love for learning within every individual. You can activate that. You can light that fire.
And then in schools, you have teachers doing all kinds of things. They’re fixing the printer, they’re the computer guy, they’re the feeding person, they’re the coach of the sports team. That’s what I mean when I say 20th-century organization. May principal, may teacher, and then they do everything. There’s no clear delineation. We want to have an organization that’s more functional. But then you have to work with the bureaucracy because it’s so huge. Over a million people.
We’re looking to be more efficient and harness all the technologies. We’re living in a time of rapid change where [artificial intelligence] is going to change everything. To harness the power of AI, you need good data, whether it is for decision-making or for teaching.
The data only enables you to do your job better. You still have to do the job and you have to ask the right questions. Just like AI is all dependent on how you prompt it, what you ask it to do, how specific are the instructions you give. You have to be clear about what you want. In our case, it’s to deliver better education to poor people and to achieve better results.
Why do you think we remained in that 20th-century system for such a long time?
It’s inertia. Habit. Sometimes, that’s what you inherited so that’s what you continue going forward. In a system like DepEd where it’s top-down, it did not do justice to outstanding teachers, outstanding administrators, outstanding schools, and outstanding practices at the local level.
Now, we’re trying to see what really is outstanding. There was this thing called Dynamic Learning Program in Bohol which produced great results. We’re trying to scale that up to address all the learning loss, 30 to 40 school days lost because of bad weather. What happens? In a private school, they would have a hybrid class. Tuloy ‘yong klase online. Sa DepEd, walang ganoon. Bibigyan lang ng papel ‘yong estudyante. “Basahin mo ‘yan. Mag-usap tayo ulit.” Doon pa lang, umaangat na ‘yong isa. Ito naiiwan. That’s what we mean.
Maybe there’s a different management style needed also. Not just top-down, but also bottom-up.
Would you say that a large part of your policy focus is, right now, on teachers? Because you addressed that there’s a lack of teachers in many fields.
Yes. That’s one of the first things [President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.] told us when he appointed us [is] to take care of our teachers. He was a local government executive, so he saw how teachers would do. Again, he’s also someone just like my father who’s interested in systemic solutions. He’s willing to put in the work [even after] realizing that it may not be the sexiest solution. It may not be the most media-friendly solution. But it’s a solution. It will be a lasting solution.
So here, finally, we’re getting a lot of administrative officers to do the non-teaching jobs, the administrative stuff. Every year, I think, we’re getting 5,000 to 10,000 of them, so teachers can focus on teaching.
Another aspect that the President really wants is to modernize and adopt modern technology. Not for the sake of saying you’re modern and you have technology but really to make life easier for the teacher. What used to take two days or a day to make your lesson plan. Now, you can do it in less than an hour. With things like AI tutors, it’s not so painful to teach a class of 50, 60. Of course, that shouldn’t happen anymore in the future. You should not have classes that big. But that’s the reality. So ‘pag ganoon, how do you divide your class? There are [people who are] advanced, there are people [who are] behind. You focus on those [who are] behind. And those advanced, they can talk to their AI tutors muna. They can go ahead. But in a conventional class setting, you won’t be able to do that.
Part of the challenge is that we have a large population. How do you think education can address that?
You need resources. Rather than just relying on the traditional budgetary requirement, we’re trying to involve the private sector more through public-private partnerships. Nawala ‘yong [public-private partnerships] for the last few years. It’s a way of fast tracking and front loading your infrastructure. What I should also say is that we have a young population and there’s like a 15 to 20 year window to maximize that population. If we don’t educate well, we’re not maximizing our young population.
There’s also the issue that Filipinos have poor reading comprehension.
Yeah. But we’re confident that we can improve that going forward because there was a time when we were better. Maybe we just need a more holistic approach. Sometimes it’s nutrition. We have a new vision screening law that we’re trying to implement because sometimes it’s the eyesight of the kids. Sometimes it’s the teaching, so training the teachers is important. In the past, the new teachers were assigned to very low-grade levels. In other countries, they assign more experienced teachers to teach the lower levels. And there’s also a greater degree of mentorship.
In Finland, which is known for its educational system, a kindergarten teacher will have a mentor teaching her, watching her. That’s very difficult in terms of personnel. Kulang na nga ang teacher, sabay mentor pa. But we’re just trying to pick up good ideas, [the] best practices here and there.
