By Estanislao Albano, Jr.
The World Bank (WB) erred when it said in its latest statement on Philippine education woes that it was the Covid-19 pandemic which caused the spike in the country’s learning poverty – the share of 10 years olds who cannot read and understand simple texts – from 69.5 percent in 2019 to 90 percent in August 2021.
The allegation assumes that the subject pupils were supposed to learn to read in SY 2019-2020 onwards but were prevented from doing so by the constraints of remote learning. However, based on the Grade 1 minimum age requirement of six years, the 10 year olds as of August 2021 completed either Grade 2 or Grade 3 as of March 2020 when the pandemic threw a monkey wrench on their schooling and were supposed to be already literate.
Under the K to 12 Curriculum, pupils are taught reading in the mother tongue in Grade 1, reading in Filipino starting in the first semester of Grade 2 and in English starting in the second semester of Grade 2. This means that before the shift to distance learning in SY 2020-2021, if DepEd is effective in beginning reading, the students on whose reading skills our learning poverty rate in 2021 was based should at least be reading in Filipino and mother tongue. Since obviously, the DepEd failed in the task, the students’ illiteracy was not due to Covid-19 lockdown but the ineptness of the agency.
If there are pupils whose inability to read can be rightly attributed to difficulties of remote learning, it is those who enrolled in Grade 1 in SYs 2020-2021.
In its statement responding to the WB report, the DepEd said:”The issue of learning poverty has been a dilemma of the country for years and the Department is proactively dealing with it for the long term. With the objectives of the Sulong EduKalidad campaign and Basic Education Development Plan (BEDP) 2030 set to materialize in the coming years, we are leaving behind a worthy mission to continue for the next DepEd administration.”
This is baloney. Learning poverty in public schools could be eradicated in a flash if only the DepEd comes to its senses and rectifies its insane and injurious reading policies. Our private schools have zero learning poverty because they chose to stick with the tried and tested “No Read, No Move” Policy which prohibits the promotion of children who could not read to Grade 2 when the DepEd fixed what was not broken and replaced the policy with the “no non-reader in Grade 4” target in 2001.
In other words, the DepEd should be called to account for the entire 90 percent learning poverty of the country as of August 2021.
In the same statement, the DepEd also claimed it is undertaking several reforms pursuant to the goals of the Sulong EduKalidad education reform agenda including teacher professional development. The truth of the matter is even the best beginning reading teachers in the world will be up against impossible odds since it is now common knowledge among school children that even if they do not acquire the fundamental skill, they get promoted to the next grade and could even graduate from the elementary grades anyway.
Furthermore, due to their financial standings, it is a common among private schools to hire unlicensed teachers, a practice not allowed in public schools, and yet private schools succeed in making their Grade 1 pupils read at the end of the school year and we have this runaway learning poverty in public schools. In fact, even people with no training in teaching could usher children to literacy so the DepEd should not subtly and childishly try to shift the blame for our learning poverty to teachers.
And yes, even granting for the sake of argument that poor skills in teaching reading factors in our learning poverty incidence, whose fault is it that public school teachers are not properly trained to teach reading? How come the DepEd only thought of “teacher professional development” in 2019 when the learning poverty had already hit 69.5 percent? To begin with, if indeed there are now professional teachers who fumble the task of teaching reading, whose fault is it that they got into the DepEd? **
