By Estanislao Albano, Jr.
When they announced that the country will be participating in 2022 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) late last month, top officials of the Department of Education (DepEd) led by Secretary Leonor Briones sanguinely expressed the intent to improve our performance even as they discussed stop gap measures intended to make that happen. They dwelt upon the need of enhancing reading literacy performance but as usual, they made it look like the problem was only in the aspect of comprehension and does not include students who could not read at all. Yes, there was no mention of the grim and impossible odds surrounding our future participations in the PISA such as the following:
First, the educational foundation of the students who took the 2018 PISA was laid by the old curriculum which is a unquestionably superior to K to 12 Curriculum when it comes to the development of proficiency in English, the test language. Consider the drastic reduction of the role of English in the first three grades on account of the adoption of the Mother Tongue policy as follows: time allotment per day reduced from 100 minutes to 43.33 minutes; beginning reading in English offered starting in second semester of Grade 2 while before, children were reading in English in Grade 1; English becomes medium of instruction in only Grade 4 instead of in Grade 1 as the medium of instruction from Grades 1 to 3 in Mother Tongue.
Given those distinct advantages in the learning of English, our students still landed at the bottom of the heap so how in the world could the DepEd now say that the inferior curriculum would bring better results specially so that the K to 12 high school curriculum allots only 240 minutes per week each to English, Science and Mathematics as against the 300 minutes a week set by the 2002 Basic Education Curriculum (BEC) (DepEd Order No. 43, series of 2002; DepEd Order No. 021, series of 2019)? And this is not only a hypothetical question because the first batch of K to 12 graduates scored the worst in English in the Grade 6 NAT. The national English mean percentage score (MPS) was 5.71 or 14.14 percent lower than the previous which is the sharpest ever normal fluctuation in a year the record previously being the 5.26 or 8.89 percent setback experienced in 2006 and the second highest the 2.70 or 3.98 percent incurred in 2011. It is very telling that in 2017 when elementary products of the BEC took the test for the last time, the English MPS gained 0.57or 1.53 percent.
There simply is no way K to 12 products can overcome the crippling handicaps to beat or even just perform at par with BEC products in English. Apart from the unusually low English score in the NAT of the first elementary products of the K to 12, the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS) also found in its study titled “Starting Where the Children Are’: A Process Evaluation of the Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education Implementation” released in 2019, that public schools consistently lose in regional contests conducted in English because private school pupils understand the questions better. The study bared that private schools do not implement the Mother Tongue policy but stick to the old Bilingual Education Policy (BEP).
Second, there never was a time in the recent memory that we had more non-readers and frustration level reader in high school than we have now. Exposed by the Manila Times in early 2018, it had since become public knowledge that even our high schools are invaded by non-readers and struggling readers. The situation which the DepEd still determinedly wants to deny and hide has been confirmed by no less than the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) when it reported that in the 2019 Southeast Asian Primary Learning Metrics (SEA-PLM) assessment it conducted jointly with the Southeast Asia Ministers of Education Organization (SEAMEO), it was found that 27 percent of our Grade 5 pupils could not read based on the SEA-PLM definition of reading literacy. Only Laos did worse than the Philippines in Reading Literacy in the survey.
Naturally and logically, if there are that many non-readers in Grade 5, more so in Grade 4. Thus it did not come as a surprise that from third to the bottom when our Grade 4 pupils first joined the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) in 2003, in 2019, they finished last of 58 countries. They scored 61 and 83 points lesser than their 2003 counterparts in Mathematics and Science, respectively.
If nothing else could compel the DepEd to address our reading woes maturely, this confirmation from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) which conducts the PISA that success in any school subject is dependent on reading literacy should otherwise we may also claim the cellar of the SEA-PLM soon: “Reading is a prerequisite for successful performance in any school subject. By incorporating the three literacy domains of Mathematics, Reading and Science, PISA 2000 provides information on the relationships between the domains. The correlation between the Reading and Mathematics scores in PISA is 0.81, and the correlation between Reading and Science scores is 0.86 (“Reading for change: Performance and engagement across countries,” Page 15).
Thus the reading crisis all but dooms our chance of performing better in the PISA because students who could not read or could hardly read expectedly bring up the rear in examinations. That is unless between now and the enrolment this June, our DepEd officials will come to their senses and belatedly heed the suggestion of the Philippine Institute for Development Studies back in early 2019 for schools to stop sending non-readers to high school which they have ignored until now and clear up the secondary from illiterates ensuring that this time around, we will not be sending any to the PISA. That would mean a lot for our chances of budging from the cellar because for one, in 2018 we were edged out by Dominican Republic by only two points in Reading Literacy.
For the sake of the country, DepEd should cut the charade and stop sending non-readers to international assessment surveys. **
