By Estanislao Albano, Jr.
Relative to your call to the Department of Education (DepEd) to release the nationwide Philippine Informal Reading Inventory (Phil-IRI) results which the agency is balking at, we strongly suggest that the agency be also asked for the number of non-readers and frustration level readers in Grade 7 in school year 2019-2020 thenceforth. It is a common practice for high schools to organize separate classes for these students as could be shown in the cases of the Sauyo High School, Novaliches, Quezon City (“Pag-asa sa Pagbasa,” I Witness, GMA 7 September 1, 2018), the Pagasa National High School in Legazpi City (“70,000 Bicol pupils can’t read – DepEd,” Philippine Daily Inquirer, February 17, 2020) and Tabuk City National High School (“How Kalinga’s biggest high school copes with reading woes,” Manila Times, March 12, 2020).
Unlike in the case of the Phil-IRI non-reader data for the elementary grades, the DepEd cannot quibble over the Grade 7 non-reader statistics because in the first place, a student would not be included in the remedial reading class unless he is a non-reader or frustrated reader. Please note that while national education officials led by Secretary Leonor Briones did their best to minimize and discredit the Philippine Daily Inquirer expose on the Bicol reading mess, they conspicuously did not say one word about the part of the story where the principal of Pagasa National High School declared that 37 of their more than 600 Grade 7 students “did not know how to read.” The DepEd officials did not realize that all their efforts to gloss over the thousands of non-readers in the elementary grades in Bicol were for naught since the report showed there are Grade 7 non-readers in a school in the center of the region at that.
For good measure, we cite the case of Baguio City where school officials revealed that for school year 2019-2020, they have 52 Grade 7 non-readers (“Filipino subject top among Grade 6, 10 Baguio learners,” Baguio Midland Courier, November 24, 2019). This is very telling considering that Baguio City is one of the top schools divisions in the entire country based on performance in assessment tests. The Cordillera Administrative Region (CAR) which the division dominates topped the Grade 6 National Achievement Test (NAT) in 2016 and 2017 (the DepEd is withholding the NAT nationwide results for 2019 from the undersigned) and was fourth among the regions in the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). If a strong division has high school non-readers, it is axiomatic the weaker divisions have more.
With these Grade 7 non-reader data from the above-mentioned cities out in the open and the finding of the DepEd that our takers in the urban areas outperformed those from the rural areas by 42 points in Reading Literacy in the PISA (PISA 2018 National Report of the Philippines, vii), there is no way the national high school non-reader incidence can be hidden. Nonetheless, to ensure the integrity of the data, we strongly suggest that the report be under oath.**
