By Estanislao Albano, Jr.
• Regional Director May Eclar, CAR and Region 3
DepEd-CAR Regional Memorandum No. 013.2020 dated January 9, 2020, reiterated the “No Read, No Pass Policy.”
DepEd-Region 3 Regional Memorandum No. 141, s. 2023, dated March 29, s. 2023, directing the submission of the enrolment and non-reader data. The reporting template she provided covered Grades 1-12.
• Regional Director Tolentino Aquino, Region 1
DepEd-Region 1 Office Memorandum No. 198, s. 2021, dated June 14, 2021, unveiled the reading intervention program “Reading First for Region 1: DepEd Region 1’s Response to Hamon: Bawat Bata Bumabasa.” The description of the reading program cited the following Phil-IRI reading assessment test data: 7,296 non-readers in Filipino in Grades 3-6 and 11,993 non-readers in English in Grades 4-6. It also said that there are struggling readers in high school.
• Regional Director Gilbert Sadsad, Region 5
In a statement posted on the Facebook page of DepEd-Region 5 on February 17, 2020, Sadsad clarified a report of the Philippine Daily Inquirer that there are 70,000 students in Bicol who cannot read claiming the 70,000 is the unvalidated figure from the schools division offices and that after validation, the actual numbers were “about 20,587 pupils out of the 315,161 from Grades 4 to 6 who took the English test and 18,143 of the 336,849 from Grades 3 to 6 who took the Filipino test can be considered as struggling readers.” Whether those students cannot read or only struggle to read, Sadsad’s statement is a damning admission that mass promotion is going on under his nose because per K to 12 Curriculum, by Grade 3, learners are already supposed to be reading in English with comprehension.
Considering that Bayocot and Eclar issued memoranda which prove the promotion of reading laggards while serving in two different regions, these eight DepEd regional directors confirmed the prevalence of mass promotion in 10 of the 17 regions of the country. Please note that NCR,
CAR and Region 4-A which were in the top 4 of Reading in the 2018 and 2022 PISA rounds are in the list but CARAGA and Region 9 which were in the bottom 3 in Reading in the 2018 and 2022 PISA are not. This means that the regions whose regional directors were not mentioned are in no better position in terms of reading literacy and therefore, likewise in the pervasiveness of the mass promotion practice.
3. The assertion “that some incentive structures and evaluation systems might be unintentionally encouraging mass promotion” is erroneous because based on existing documentary evidence, mass promotion resulted from an orchestrated, concerted and determined effort of the DepEd to achieve
100 percent completion rate – completion rate is the percentage of learners who finish the elementary level and secondary level at the prescribed number of years – and its intervening indicators specifically zero drop-out rate, zero failure rate, zero repetition rate and 100 percent promotion rate.
Based on the undersigned’s investigation, the drive for maximum completion rate goes back to sometime in the early 2000s when the DepEd adopted internal efficiency as one of the performance indicators in its implementation of the Philippine Education For All (EFA) 2015 National Action Plan particularly Objective No. 2 which is as follows: “Universal School Participation and Elimination of Drop-outs and Repetition in First Three Grades.”
The undersigned opines that Objective No. 2 bastardized the corresponding world EFA target which is as follows: “ensure that by 2015 all children, particularly girls, children in difficult circumstances and those belonging to ethnic minorities, have access to and complete free and compulsory primary education of good quality.”
The world EFA goal does not call for the unnatural elimination of drop-outs and repetitions and completion of elementary education in six years but merely for the completion of the elementary grades without specifying that such should be accomplished within the prescribed number of years. For comparison, Vietnam which is also a member of the world EFA movement retains students who cannot cope with grade level standards.
This means that the goal to eliminate drop-outs and repetitions is exclusively the invention of the DepEd and did not emanate from the EFA as it wants to make it appear. **To be continued
