By Estanislao Albano, Jr.
When asked by the media in November 2023 for the total number of non-readers and slow readers in the country, then Education Secretary Sara Duterte had answered that the data was in the process of being consolidated. It is not surprising that until she resigned eight months later, she has not bared any figure because the truth of the matter is the existing manual of the Philippine Informal Reading Inventory (Phil-IRI), the reading assessment tool of the Department of Education (DepEd), does not record nor report non-readers.
Since its inception in 2004, the Phil-IRI classified learners based on their performance in the test as frustration readers, instructional readers, independent readers and non-readers. The classification was used in the class, school, district, division, regional and national reading profiles which were then the outputs of the Phil-IRI process.
The templates for the profiles provided in DepEd Memorandum No. 324, series of 2004, were maintained in the Phil-IRI manual issued during the watch of Secretary Jesli Lapus.
However, in the Phil-IRI Manual 2018 issued during the time of Secretary Leonor Briones, the practice of classifying learners by their reading levels and if they are non-readers was discontinued. The class reading profile merely records if pupils passed the test and are reading at grade level or they failed it. The manual does not require the recording of the identities and the number of non-readers.
The alteration resulted into variations in the treatment of non-readers in Phil-IRI data among DepEd field offices. Some like the DepEd-SOCCSKSARGEN record and report non-readers (Regional Memorandum CLMD 2023-155), others like DepEd-Region X omit the Non-reader column (Regional Memorandum No. 110, s. 2019) and some others like the DepEd-Cebu Province (Division Memorandum No. 425, series of 2021) and DepEd-Tagbilaran City (Division Memorandum No. 406, series of 2021) replace the “Non-reader” column with a “Struggling Readers” column. The term “struggling readers” does not appear in Phil-IRI issuances and manuals.
Apparently, the current DepEd leadership agrees with the decision not to record non-readers. The reporting templates supplied by DM-CT-2024-145, a memorandum from the Office of the Undersecretary for Curriculum and Training requesting the DepEd regional offices to submit their SY 2022-2023 and SY 2023-2024 Phil-IRI data, do not have the “Non-reader” column.
It is also noted that under the old Phil-IRI procedures, there was no need for the DepEd central office to ask regional offices for Phil-IRI data as the submission of the same to higher DepEd levels up to the Bureau of Elementary Education and the consolidation of the same into each level’s reading profile was part of the process.
By contrast, the Phil-IRI Manual 2018 does not give any instructions nor provide templates for the reporting of Phil-IRI data to entities outside the school. The alteration hampered the policy-making purpose of the Phil-IRI (DepEd Memorandum No. 153, series of 2006, and DepEd Memorandum No. 186, series of 2007) as the results no longer reach the policy-makers in the central office unless they officially ask as in the above-cited instance.
More importantly, even if the DepEd central office is automatically furnished with the Phil-IRI results, the policies and actions the data will prompt would most likely have no effect on the reading crisis or worse, even exacerbate it because, bereft of non-reader figures, the picture it will present will be false.
Briones should explain why when all the relevant facts were needed to come up with the appropriate response to the deepening reading problem, she and her team chose to write off and hide the existence of non-readers when it is the plight of these unfortunate students and their number which define the enormity of the crisis.**
