By Estanislao Albano, Jr.

In its report “Fixing the Foundation: Teachers and Basic Education in East Asia and Pacific,” the World Bank (WB) tagged deficient teaching skills as the primary factor for the country’s runaway 91 percent learning poverty. This is a gross error which wrongfully lets off the hook the real culprit: the Department of Education (DepEd).
The WB calculated the country’s learning poverty rate from the Reading results of the 2019 Southeast Asia Primary Learning Metrics (SEA-PLM), a test our Grade 5 pupils took in English. The norm is for countries to teach their schoolchildren to read in their primary medium of instruction and thus, their local and international test language in Grade 1. Some academically leading countries like Singapore and Estonia do it even earlier. But in the case of the Philippines, not even the best reading teachers can teach public school students to read in English in Grade 1 because that would be a violation of the curriculum. Under the K to 12 Curriculum, the English reading competency is only introduced in the second semester of Grade 2 (Phil-IRI Manual 2018, page 1).
That means the students whose reading skills served as basis for the pegging of the country’s learning poverty rate were reading in the language used for only two years at most although they were already in Grade 5.
And that is for those among our SEA-PLM takers who learned to read. According to the results of the SEA-PLM, 27 percent of Grade 5 students could not read based on the SEA-PLM reading literacy definition. Those students were “still at the stage of matching single words to an image of a familiar object or concept” and “have not yet developed the essential foundational skills that are the building blocks of becoming a proficient reader.” The SEA-PLM defines reading literacy as “understanding, using and responding to a range of written texts, in order to meet personal, societal, economic and civic needs.” (“SEA-PLM 2019 Main Regional Report,” pages 41-44).
How come those reading laggards were in Grade 5 when the K to 12 Curriculum provides that at the end of Grade 3, a learner should be a fluent reader in English and DepEd Order No. 45, series of 2002, states that no child should be promoted to Grade 4 if he could not competently read? Blame it on the practice of the DepEd of promoting to the next grade the ineligible including illiterates known as mass promotion. (“EdCom II should probe, stop rampant mass promotion immediately,” Letters, Philippine Daily Inquirer, 9/21/23)
In 1995 before the advent of mass promotion, the Elementary Assessment Test showed that 59 percent of Grade 6 pupils mastered reading and writing (“Report: Philippine Country EFA Assessment”). On the other hand, the 2019 SEA-PLM found that only 10 percent of our Grade 5 pupils were reading at a level “generally expected of children at the end of primary education.”
The fact that private schools have no problem with reading literacy when their teachers are less trained and less qualified than their public school counterparts also debunks the WB finding. With the higher pay and better benefits in public schools, the trend is for private school teachers to migrate to public schools. Likewise, public schools have more qualified teaching personnel because the DepEd does not hire unlicensed teachers while it is a common practice among private schools to hire unlicensed teachers due to economic constraints (“DepEd to help private schools address shortage of licensed teachers,” Manila Bulletin, 7/2/18). Given these circumstances, if deficient teaching skills is the main factor for learning poverty, then there should be more non-readers in private schools but on the contrary, they practically have no non-readers starting from Grade 2 while public schools produce elementary graduates who could not read.
The DepEd admits that private schools are unaffected by the reading crisis gripping public schools. It only addressed the “Hamon: Bawat Bata Bumabasa” memorandum, its response to the reading crisis which it issued in 2019, to public schools (DepEd Memorandum No. 173, series of 2019). How come? Private schools make their pupils read in Grade 1 and they do not practice mass promotion. Paging the WB. (Published in the October 6, 2023 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer)**