By Estanislao Albano, Jr.
In a recent news release, the Second Congressional Commission on Education (EDCOM II) which is at the end of its three-year term alleged that the involvement of the Department of Education (DepEd) in some 261 inter-agency bodies is hampering its efforts to teach functional literacy. It said that because of these added responsibilities, the foremost intention the basic education component of the then Department of Education, Culture and Sports was segregated in 1994 which is to “enable the agency to focus solely on basic education to address the 14.5 million functionally illiterates in the 1990s” is not being realized. It added that as a result, “the number of functional illiterate Filipinos almost doubled to 24.8 million” in the last 30 years.
The truth is the number of functional illiterates almost tripled since 2003. According to the 2003 Functional Literacy, Education and Mass Media Survey (FLEMMS), the functional illiterates that year numbered 9.2 M. This data which was conspicuously missing in EDCOM II news release shows that the number of functional illiterates dipped by 5.3M between 1994 and 2003.
Parenthetically, the functional illiteracy incidence went further down to 6.7 M in the 2019 FLEMMS but the accuracy of the figures after the 2003 survey is suspect due to the DepEd 2002 decision to discard the No Read, No Move Policy which provided that Grade 1 learners could only be promoted when they know how to read and had started passing non-readers all the way to high school. Before the 2024 FLEMMS, junior high school graduates were automatically classified as functional literates.
The EDCOM II’s attempt to shift the blame for the functional illiteracy problem to the inter-agency load of the DepEd is ridiculous and deceitful. The 2024 FLEMMS found that only 21 percent of senior high school graduates were functional illiterates when the 79 percent who attained functional literacy studied under the same conditions as the 21 percent. It follows that if the division of the attention of the DepEd is the cause of functional illiteracy among senior high school graduates, then all the graduates would be functional illiterates.
The EDCOM II also failed to connect the fact that almost four-fifths of senior high school graduates are functionally literate with its finding that 90 percent of the students with severe learning gaps refused to attend the 2024 National Learning Camp (NLC). And worse, even after the DepEd made attendance mandatory, it was still a major issue in the 2025 NLC.
Had it looked into this unacceptable behavior of the subject laggards, the EDCOM II would have discovered the following:
First, those students had the audacity to defy the DepEd because they knew from experience and observation that regardless of what they do in school, they will be promoted anyway. They were dead right because they were promoted in SY 2024-2025. The DepEd cannot deny this because had the students been retained, there would have been no problem with attendance in the 2025 NLC.
Second, the entire DepEd organization from the central office to the schools was aware that the students who did not attend the 2024 and 2025 NLCs were promoted but not one individual among the nearly 1M DepEd manpower raised his voice against the scam proving that the whole organization is complicit in the betrayal of the country’s schoolchildren.
Finally, the EDCOM II apparently does not think the DepEd’s recent decision to repeal through DepEd Order No. 018, s. 2025, DepEd Order No. 45, s. 2002, its mothballed policy barring the promotion of non-readers and frustration readers to Grade 4, relevant to the issue of functional illiteracy. The truth is the action formalizes the DepEd’s internal decision back in 2002 not to enforce DepEd Order No. 45, s. 2002, thereby welcoming non-readers in all grades which eventually resulted to this unprecedented reading crisis.
The EDCOM II is so clueless it does not realize that even if DepEd is relieved from all its inter-agency responsibilities if DepEd Order No. 45, s. 2002, is not restored and this time strictly enforced, the functional illiteracy problem, much less the reading and learning crises will never go away.
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