By Estanislao Albano, Jr.
Note: This is the full text of the statement of the Cordillera Advocates for Real Education (CARE) during the Zoom meeting of the House Bill No. 6405 technical working group on March 19, 2021 delivered by this columnist in his capacity as spokesman of the group. Just like the position statement he read in the Mother Tongue policy forum held by the DepEd and the USAID on February 22, 2021 which was earlier serialized here, the paper was unchallenged. By the way, House Bill No. 6405 authored by Baguio City Congressman Marquez Go seeks the abolition of the Mother Tongue policy.
In support of House Bill No. 6405, let me comment on some points raised during the January 28, 2021 meeting of the Basic Education and Culture Committee on the bill.
Director Jocelyn Andaya of the Department of Education (DepEd) stressed the MTB-MLE is theoretically sound but not perfectly implemented in the grassroots with variation of implementation leading to mixed results.
Dr. Ricardo Ma. Nolasco emphasized teacher quality and the failure of teacher education institutions to equip our teachers with the competence to satisfactorily implement even just the 10-year curriculum.
There are fatal and irreparable flaws of the MTB-MLE not even perfect implementation and the availability of the best trained teachers can remedy because these are parts of the MTB-MLE Curriculum.
Even when implemented under the most ideal conditions including with the best trained teachers, the MTB-MLE cannot make Grade 1 pupils read in English, our primary medium of instruction and likewise local and international assessment language and as such should be learned at the earliest possible time, because the curriculum starts the teaching of the competency in the second semester of Grade 2.
The delayed English reading timetable reared its ugly head during the Southeast Asia Primary Learning Metrics (SEA-PLM) where we were No. 5 of six countries in Reading Literacy and more importantly, in the 2019 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) where we placed last of 58 countries.
The Grade 4 pupils who represented the country in the TIMSS were reading in the test language for only one and a half years at most compared to the three years their counterparts from other countries were reading in their test languages so there really was no other way the test would have ended for the country.
To us in the CARE, it is self-evident that we cannot talk about quality education that is globally competitive as intended by the Enhanced Basic Education Act of 2013 when our school children only learn to read in the primary medium of instruction and test language in Grade 3.
Second, even in trouble-free implementation and with quality teachers, the products of the MTB-MLE cannot compete in English proficiency with the products of the old language policies specifically the Policy on Bilingual Education (PBE) because due to the adoption of the MTB-MLE, the teaching time for English was cut down to the bone in the K to 12 Curriculum as follows: daily time allotment for English subject reduced from 100 minutes to 43.33 minutes; beginning reading in English only introduced second semester of Grade 2; and usage of English as medium of instruction deferred from Grade 1 to Grade 4. (DepEd Order No. 43, series of 2002; DepEd Order No. 021, series of 2019; Revised Phil-IRI Manual, Page 1)
Given this reality, the following were not coincidental:
First, the finding of the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS) in its study Starting Where the Children Are: A Process Evaluation of the Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education Implementation that public school pupils have lost their competitiveness in regional contests conducted in English because private school contestants understand the questions better. The study said that the MTB-MLE has not been able to take hold in private schools.
Second, the unprecedented 5.71 points or 14.14 fall in the English mean percentage score when the first batch of MTB-MLE products took the Grade 6 NAT in 2018. The previous record was the 5.26 points or 8.89 percent setback in 2006. It is very telling that in 2017 when elementary products of the 2002 Basic Education Curriculum (BEC) took the test for the last time, the English MPS gained 0.57 or 1.53 percent. (The 32 points loss in 2016 is excluded from the reckoning because the cause was an ordinary fluctuation in the scores.)
The Cordillera, the Chairman’s and our region, was hit very hard by the initial onslaught of the MTB-MLE on Grade 6 NAT performance having lost a massive 9.91 points or 20.4 percent of its English MPS in 2017. This is more than thrice the 2.99 setback it incurred in 2011, the previous record. The 9.91 points was also the biggest ever loss of the Cordillera in all subjects in the NAT. The region was the top in English in the 2016 and 2017 Grade 6 NATs and was No. 3 in Reading Literacy in a tie with Region 4A among local regions in the PISA. It ended up topping the Grade 6 NAT during those two years and was No. 4 overall in the PISA.
We now ask the DepEd and other advocates of the MTB-MLE if given the very drastic reduction of exposure to English in the MTB-MLE Curriculum compared to the amount of exposure to the language under the old curriculum as detailed above, there is any way products of the MTB-MLE could overcome the crippling odds to be at par let alone outperform PBE products in English proficiency. If there is none, then what’s the point of maintaining the MTB-MLE since it cannot fulfill its promise contained in DepEd Order No. 74, series of 2009, to make the learning of new languages quicker as the old language policies are after all superior in that respect?
We also appeal to the DepEd and the other exponents of the MTB-MLE to refrain from inaccurate assignment of responsibility for disasters in our basic education which clearly proceed from the MTB-MLE Curriculum. Such practice could mislead people and it could result to wrong solutions.
For instance, holding teachers and their schools responsible for the failure of the MTB-MLE to deliver on its promise for quicker learning of reading and for the reading crisis is unfair, baseless and even childish. It does not take into account the following facts: teachers in private and public schools come from the same colleges and have received the same training; with the higher pay and better benefits in public schools, the trend is for private school teachers to migrate to public schools; and public schools have more qualified teaching personnel, because it is a common practice among private schools to hire unlicensed teachers due to economic constraints. Given these circumstances, if indeed teachers are the culprits in the proliferation of non-readers, private schools would also be producing non-readers which they do not. **(To be continued)
