If the manner the Department of Education (DepEd) has been responding to this correspondent’s requests for information and for its reactions is the norm, then the agency wants to keep the public in the dark about pressing educational issues including its alleged shortcomings and sins and has no qualms about giving requesting parties the runaround.
DepEd officials and employees do not seem to mind that delaying the release of information or denying the same with questionable reasons and dodging or outrightly ignoring requests for reaction and official statements violates the Freedom of Information (FOI) order of Malacanang and Republic Act No. 6713 or the Code of Conduct and Ethical Standards for Public Officials and Employees, respectively.
Section 11 of the DepEd in-house FOI manual provides that concerned departments are given a maximum of 15 working days to release an information extendable by not more than 20 working days in the case of requests needing extensive efforts to ready.
Section 5 (a) of RA No. 6713 mandates public officials and employees to respond to communications from the public within 15 working days from receipt of the same.
Take the case of this correspondent’s request for the summary of the results of the National Achievement Test (NAT) per region in connection with his investigation on the effects of the changes in the curriculum and related DepEd policies and programs on the learning performance of elementary and high school students sent on April 26, 2018.
After the 15 working day period, this correspondent called the Bureau of Education Assessment (BEA) to follow up may be no less than five times getting varied reasons as to why the document has not yet been released such as the employee in charge being on official business. It was only on August 15 or more than three months later when the BEA emailed the data for school years 2012-2013 to 2016-2017.
There was no explanation as to how come the data was only for five school years when what was requested was from the initiation of the examinations up to 2017 and how come it took them almost four months to release what is supposed to be a readily available information.
News blackout on textbook review?
On January 30, 2019, this correspondent emailed Undersecretary for Finance-Budget and Performance Monitoring Annalyn Sevilla requesting for details of the ongoing textbook review.
The announcement of Secretary Leonor Briones for the conduct of the review sometime last August was very sketchy.
This correspondent wanted to find out among others the current status of the review and deadline for completion, whether or not the output will be publicized and if the corrections will entail recall of the copies of the defective textbooks and the printing of the corrected versions.
A thorough research of the DepEd website yielded no document referring to the review.
Although her office acknowledged receipt of the letter, Sevilla has not responded until now.
The request of this correspondent for copies of the regional review outputs emailed to BLR Officer-in-Charge Edel Carag on March 7 was denied because “the said documents are presently being processed for validation activity that we will conduct this month.”
Also, in an email dated March 29, DepEd-Cordillera Administration Region Director May Eclar recommended to this correspondent to obtain a copy of the CAR review findings from the BLR “to provide wider scope of the results.”
She said that as mandated by DepEd Memorandum DM-CI-2018-00-361, the summary of findings was submitted to the national DepEd office through the Bureau of Learning Resources (BLR) for the “Validation Workshop, Preparation of Teaching Notes and evaluation of the Quality Assurance process of the department.”
She informed that CAR only reviewed the Grade 4 textbooks and output will be collaborated with the results of the reviews from the other regions.
This correspondent notes, however, that Memorandum DM-CI-2018-00-361 of the office of the Undersecretary for Curriculum and Instruction states that Grade 4 textbooks and learning materials were exclusively assigned to the CAR as each of the regions were given their own set of textbooks and learning materials to review.
The term “information” as defined by the FOI executive order and likewise in the DepEd FOI manual embraces things like reports, minutes of meeting, data and other similar documents and records.
No DepEd official can answer non-reader issue?
On October 8, 2018, this correspondent emailed BEA Director Nelia Benito soliciting reaction to the special report on the existence of Grade 7 non-readers in some schools in Tabuk City and Kalinga in the April 29 and May 10 issues of this paper and also the documentary of the I-Witness program of the GMA7 aired on September 1, 2018 showing that the National Capital Region (NCR) is not spared from the high school non-reader phenomenon.
Among the questions were the following:
1. Is the DepEd leadership aware of the growing number of non-readers in high school? Does the DepEd have data on the number of high school non-readers in the whole country as per results of Phil-IRI pre-test? What are the totals in SY 2013-2014 through SY 2017-2018?
2. When and why did DepEd scrap the rule not to pass Grade 1 pupils unless they could read?
3. Is there a DepEd mass promotion policy? If so, what’s the specific issuance setting it forth, the rationale, history, how it works and what the agency thinks is its effect on the education of Filipino children? If the DepEd says that there is no such policy, how come the agency allows non-readers to march through the grades and even graduate from the elementary?
4. What do you say to the observation that the K-12 curriculum does not prioritize the learning of reading given the stretching of the timeframe for the learning of reading and the reduction of the time it allots to language arts?
This correspondent would find out later that the BEA referred the query to the office of Curriculum and Instruction Undersecretary Lorna Dig-Dino which in turn forwarded the letter to the office of the Secretary on October 16, 2018. When the correspondent called the Secretary’s office on December 17, he was informed that the letter was referred to yet another official.
Tired of waiting for someone in the agency to sit down and answer the query, the correspondent hazarded a request for an interview with Secretary Leonor Briones through an email on January 3.
Benito responded five days later saying the letter was referred to her office and since the Mother Tongue program is under the Bureau of Learning Delivery (BLD), she advised the correspondent to see BLD Director Leila Areola and Teaching and Learning Division chief Rosalina Villaneza. (This correspondent had mentioned in his request that he would also take the opportunity to get the reaction of the agency on the article “Mother Tongue program hampers English, reading progress – teacher” in the December 20, 2018 Manila Times.)
There was no mention of the request for interview in the letter.
As a last recourse to get the answers, this correspondent who is based in Tabuk City, Kalinga visited the BLD on January 14. Finding that both Areola and Villaneza were unavailable, he asked if anyone could speak on their behalf at which Supervising Education Program Specialist Jocelyn Tuguinayo and Senior Education Program Specialists Angel Jabines and Nemia Cedo agreed to be interviewed.
The interview tackled the findings of Baguio City English teacher Noemi Balalao that instead of facilitating the learning of English as touted, the Mother Tongue program has set back the English proficiency and even English reading ability of pupils, the phenomenon of non-readers and how come the national office could not produce Phil-IRI data this correspondent was requesting when the manual mandates that the results are consolidated at the school, division and regional offices before submission to the national office.
Due to a meeting the interviewees had to attend, it was agreed that this correspondent email further questions which he did on February 26. Up until now, they only answered one of the eight questions posed in the email.
Among the questions and issues the interviewees have not answered are the following: the media reports on the existence of Grade 7 non-readers and four DepEd regional memoranda and one division online post recognizing the existence of the high school non-reader problem in respective areas; when and why the “No Read, No Move” policy for Grade 1 was scrapped; and if the DepEd has already issued any directive to the field offices to see to it no non-reader will be allowed to graduate from the elementary.
The correspondent had asked the last question because during the interview, the BLD officials had maintained that the elementary school principals are to blame for the presence of non-readers in high school because they attested that the pupils satisfactorily completed the curriculum and that it is the lookout of these school officials that elementary school graduates be able to read.
Where are the Phil-IRI records?
On October 4, 2018, through an email, this correspondent requested data of the results of the Philippine Informal Reading Inventory (Phil-IRI) for school years 2011-2012 and 2017-2018 and the results in between in the event these are available.
The Phil-IRI which is conducted at the start and then the end of the school year is a test to assess the reading skill levels of pupils.
BLD Director Areola responded through a letter dated October 12, 2018 but only emailed to this correspondent on November 6, 2018 clarifying that the BLD does not have available data on the Phil-IRI because it is a classroom-based assessment tool for purposes of intervention at the school level and recommending that this correspondent coordinate with the school division offices for the consolidated data of their schools.
On November 7, this correspondent emailed asking for clarification on the instruction on the Phil-IRI oral and silent reading tests manuals posted online which state that the Phil-IRI tests results are consolidated at the each level for ultimate submission to the Bureau of Elementary Education Central Office.
He also asked Areola how the DepEd regional and central offices would be able to monitor the prevailing level of reading proficiency in the school system if the Phil-IRI data does not go higher than the division level.
The letter remains unanswered to this day.
When the issue came up during the interview with the BLD education program specialists on January 14, Tuguinayo had explained that the DepEd does not prepare a national reading profile on the rationale that the Phil-IRI is intended for classroom intervention and is already addressed at the school level.
She further said that under the old Phil-IRI manual, they used to consolidate the results but in 2009, some officials of the DepEd questioned the need to maintain a national database since the concept of the Phil-IRI is to serve as an reading assessment tool on the classroom level. She alleged the DepEd then decided to cease maintaining the database.
When this correspondent cited in an email after the interview DepEd Memorandum No. 266, series of 2010, and DepEd Orders No. 70, series of 2011 and No. 50, series of 2012, all of which mention a Phil-IRI database, Tuguinayo rectified her information saying it was in 2012, through DepEd Memorandum No. 143, series of 2012, titled “Assessment of Reading in Public Elementary Schools” when the management and maintenance of the Phil-IRI database was terminated as the issuance no longer requires the schools to submit results to the database.
In an email on March 4, this correspondent pointed out that DepEd Memorandum No. 143, series of 2012, the same memorandum she cited, also states that the consolidated school reading profile “can be shared with the Regional Office (RO) and Central Office (CO) to provide valuable inputs in terms of knowledge, programming and policy formulation.”
Tuguinayo has not yet commented on the observation as of press time.
Neither has the BLD acted on the this correspondent’s renewed request for the Phil-IRI results data this time specifically for “ the regional consolidated reading profiles or the summary of whatever data were submitted to the Phil-IRI database during the school years it was operational” contained in the March 4 email.
Little does the DepEd realize that in ducking questions about its performance in teaching reading and in withholding data on the results of the test that could gauge such performance, it is unwittingly confirming the observation that our public elementary schools have become shadows of their former selves when it comes to curing illiteracy. **Estanislao Albano, Jr.
