By Estanislao Albano, Jr.
In recent posts in its Facebook page, the Second Congressional Commission on Education (EDCOM II) touted the effectivity of the Teaching at Right Level (TaRL), a foundational skills teaching method which groups learners according to their actual reading abilities rather than by their ages and grade levels developed by an Indian NGO, and have urged the Department of Education (DepEd) to implement it this coming school year.
The EDCOM II see in the TaRL an apt solution to the common situation where learners in one class have different reading levels “making it difficult for teachers to adjust.” According to the posts, the TaRL ensures that all learners acquire foundational skills and that the method has been highly successful in other countries.
The EDCOM II does not realize that the TaRL and all the other solutions to the reading crisis it has so far thought of do not compare with the traditional “No Read, No Move Policy” which prohibited the promotion of Grade 1 pupils until they could read. Before DepEd discarded the policy in 2002, it was just the Grade 1 teachers who were conducting reading remediation for the laggards in the class. The DepEd did not have organized literacy remediation programs then as it was not necessary with all Grade 2 pupils being able to read.
The effectivity of the “No Read, No Move Policy” is manifest in the recommendation of the 1991 EDCOM for the assessment of functional literacy at the end of Grade 4 which ironically, the EDCOM II itself reported on page 104 of its EDCOM II Year Two Report. Relative to this, there were no indications in 1991 EDCOM’s report “Making Education Work: An Agenda for Reform” that the teaching and learning of reading was a cause for concern during that period. These statements on pages xiv and 9, respectively, show that the problem then was reversion to illiteracy and not failure to teach reading skills: “How can we be detached when we are faced with evidence that our young people revert to illiteracy because their instruction is indifferent?; “Most of those who drop out of the early grades lapse into illiteracy.”
There are other documentary evidence proving that there’s a gaping gap in the literacy levels of students before and after the scrapping of the “No Read, No Move Policy.” The intent of RA No. 7165, the law creating the Literacy Coordinating Council enacted in 1991, is to totally eradicate illiteracy but it said nothing about the participation of schools in the pursuit of the goal implying that at the time, schools were still performing their task of teaching reading satisfactorily.
In 2002, the year the “No Read, No Move Policy” was scrapped, then Education Secretary Raul Roco attested in DepEd Order No. 25, s. 2002, that there were no non-readers in the elementary grades, only some pupils who lacked reading comprehension. This is worlds apart from the 21 percent incidence of senior high school functionally illiterate graduates recently reported by the Philippine Statistics Authority.
If the EDCOM II wants to validate the record from living individuals, it can inquire from former 1991 EDCOM Commissioner Juan Ponce Enrile. It could also ask Cultural Center of the Philippines Chairman Jaime Laya who was Education Minister from 1984 to 1986 and the teachers who are clamoring for the restoration of the “No Read, No Move Policy” in response to its Facebook posts on the mass promotion issue how government educators were able to make schoolchildren functionally literate by Grade 4 at the time.
In laughable contrast, EDCOM II is targeting the end of Grade 3 for all learners to attain foundational literacy (EDCOM II Year Two Report, pages 44 and 380). If it does not come to its senses before it prepares its final report at the end of the year, the EDCOM II will leave the literacy situation in our public schools no better than it found it all because it refuses to acknowledge and learn from the fact that before the DepEd era, government educators ably taught Filipino children how to read. **
