By Estanislao Albano, Jr.
(Note: This piece was published in on November 9, 2023 but I maintain that the question is still relevant. Four months to the end of its life, the Second Congressional Commission on Education (EDCOM II) still has no workable plan to beat the literacy crisis. Suffice to say that on page 44 of its EDCOM II Year Two Report, the commission announced that it intends to ensure “that every learner achieves foundational literacy by the end of Grade 3” but on page 104 of the same document, it reported that its predecessor, EDCOM I, had recommended the evaluation of functional literacy by the end of Grade 4. The commission did not even realize that the recommendation of the EDCOM I meant that during that period, schoolchildren attained foundational literacy very much earlier than Grade 3 because how else could they be functionally literate in Grade 4 if they only started reading in Grade 3? So how could it be said that EDCOM II has satisfactorily addressed the reading crisis when it is recommending a retrogressive deadline for the attainment of functional literacy? And to think that between the EDCOM I and the EDCOM II, it’s the latter that has an explicit mandate to come up with reforms that will make Philippine education globally competitive. EDCOM II even spent taxpayers’ money to benchmark with Vietnam which makes sure no Grade 1 pupil is promoted unless he or she could read and write fluently and here it is recommending Grade 3 as the deadline for foundational literacy.)
In his piece “EdCom II and the promise of hope” (Philippine Daily Inquirer, 3/29/23), Second Congressional Commission on Education (EdCom II) Executive Director Karol Mark Yee wrote he had come across anecdotal evidence that there are “Grade 9 and 10 students who still cannot read or are unfamiliar with basic mathematical concepts.” Later in the article, he said that the EdCom II sought the help of the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS), agencies, universities and research centers “to ensure that we are guided by empirical data—not just anecdotal evidence.”
If presence of empirical data is a requirement of the EdCom II to act on a concern, then there must be other reasons why almost a year into its term the commission has yet to address the unimaginable phenomenon of high school illiterates. That’s because years before the body was created, empirical evidences showing that there are non-readers in the secondary were already out in the open. Here are some:
• The documentary “Pag-asa sa Pagbasa” aired by I-Witness, GMA 7 on September 1, 2018 featuring 29 Grade 7 non-readers in the Sauyo High School in Novaliches, Quezon City in SY 2018-2019.
• Pre-test of the Philippine Informal Reading Inventory, reading test of the Department of Education (DepEd), showing there were 14,289 non-readers in the secondary in Region 5 in SY 2019-2020 (“DepEd: Data on non-readers ‘premature,’ inconclusive,” Manila Bulletin, February 18, 2020).
• Result of the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) that 80 percent of our takers fell below the Pisa minimum reading proficiency level.
Given the first two evidences cited above, it is safe to assume that some of our Pisa examinees were still unable to read although they were already in high school.
In the same article, Yee wrote that the EdCom II aims to reverse the learning crisis through “effective, data-driven policies that address the root causes of the problem.” It is therefore concerning that up to now the EdCom II has yet to lift a finger on the shocking issue of high school students who could not read because our Pisa results which is arguably our most authoritative student assessment data clearly show that poor reading literacy is the root cause of our learning crisis.
The results confirm the finding of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the entity behind the Pisa, that there is a very strong positive correlation between reading proficiency and academic performance (“Reading for change: Performance and engagement across countries”). First, the Philippines was last in Reading Literacy and was second to the last in both Mathematics and Science. Second, locally, the regions which topped Reading Literacy were at the top of the Overall standings and on the other end, the weakest in Reading Literacy landed at the bottom of the Overall rankings. In fact, NCR, Region 7 and Region 4-A were top 3 in that order in both the Reading Literacy and in Overall standings while on the other extreme, Region 9, CARAGA and Region 12 were No. 15, No. 16 and No. 17, respectively, in both lists. (“PISA 2018 National Report of the Philippines,” pages 19, 31, 40).
In short, the best readers are the best students and alternatively, the worst readers are the worst students. This means that all reforms on our basic education the EdCom II will initiate in its entire term will not get us out of this unprecedented learning crisis and the commission will end up as a joke if instead of fixing the reading crisis, it continues to allow the DepEd to continue mass producing and mass promoting non-readers all the way to high school.
Apart from the foregoing empirical data, as early as 2019, state think tank PIDS which also happens to be the EdCom II’s research arm had already found that the DepEd is sending non-readers to high school and had in fact, urged the agency to stop the practice (“Pressures on public school teachers and implications on quality”). The DepEd maintains the practice but apparently, the EdCom II would rather fiddle while Rome burns. The commission does not even think the jarring information we have high school illiterates is worth looking into.**
