By Estanislao Albano, Jr.
That neither Senator Sherwin Gatchalian nor the Department of Education (DepEd) reacted to my letter “Lack of reading skills in K-12: The foundation first, Sen. Gatchalian” in the July 26, 2019 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer stressing the need for the latter to enlighten the public on when a public school pupil should become an independent reader did not come as a surprise.
The DepEd’s lack of reaction is consistent with its practice of resorting to conspiracy of silence whenever confronted with its mess. Ever since the high school non-reader issue broke out in the media early last year, the DepEd consistently regarded the matter with studied and stony silence. Not a single word referring to it in their public pronouncements and there’s no reference to it whatsoever in its website. Neither do DepEd officials accommodate requests for comments and for release of information on the issue.
In particular, the DepEd refuses to issue records of the Philippine Informal Reading Inventory (Phil-IRI), the reading assessment tool of the agency. The Phil-IRI was effected in 2004 to strengthen the implementation of the Every Child a Reader Program (ECARP) which aims to make every child an independent reader by Grade 3. The data of the standardized reading tests may give hints as to how come despite the maintenance of the Phil-IRI and the ECARP, the population of non-readers beyond Grade 4 all the way to high school is growing. Despite several follow-ups, my request for Phil-IRI results data addressed to Secretary Leonor Briones herself emailed and acknowledged on March 26, 2019 remains unacted as of this writing.
DepEd only has itself to blame for bringing us to this point where there no longer is a ready answer as to when a public school pupil should become an independent reader. Firstly, eversince the agency discarded the time-honored “No Read, No Move” policy in Grade 1 in 2001, the agency has been changing the target from one administration to the next. During the term of President Gloria Arroyo, the target was “to make every Filipino child a successful reader at his/her appropriate level by the end of Grade III,” during the Aquino years, it was changed to “Every Child Must be a Reader by Grade 1” and currently, it is “every Filipino child should be a reader and a writer at his/her grade level.”
Secondly, in contrast to the clearcut goals in the past, the present target is gibberish. What exactly does “every Filipino child should be a reader and a writer at his/her grade level” mean in the classroom and in the learning progress of a school child? In the midst of the proliferation of non-readers all the way to the secondary grades, why does the policy not have a deadline as was the practice of the education department until the Aquino administration? Going by the target, in which grade would a child be stuck unless he could read?
Material to the discussion is the recommendation of the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS), for the DepEd to stop sending non-readers to high school. If the DepEd heeds the recommendation, it would tantamount to moving the deadline for the child to become a successful reader to Grade 6 which is all of five grades from Grade 1, the level public school pupils attained the skill up until the early 2000s. If the think tank of the government is already making utterly absurd suggestions such as this, then the situation must be desperate.
Since apparently, the DepEd would not clarify the matter willingly, it is incumbent upon other government agencies and officials concerned with the state of education in the country to find the answer. Lack of effective outside intervention would only spell the continuing mass production of non-readers in the elementary grades and, while DepEd does not adopt the above-stated recommendation of the PIDS, the trouble-free passage of these unfortunate victims of our current basic education system to the secondary.
As for Senator Gatchalian, on September 18, 2018, I requested him via email to include the problem of high school non-readers in the inquiry into the current state of education mandated by Senate Resolution No. 675 which he authored. On October 11, 2019, I received an email from his office saying that the concern could be raised during forthcoming committee hearings. Eventually, however, the concern did not merit mention in Gatchalian’s statement on the findings of the investigation last March 6.
Hopefully, Senator Gatchalian and the DepEd will eventually realize they cannot dodge the reading crisis indefinitely because for one, an overwhelming majority of Filipino adults learned to read in Grade 1 and find it incredible and unacceptable that these days, many children attain the skill as late as high school. And in the case of the DepEd, the more its officials dig in, the more victims they will have to answer for eventually. **
