By Estanislao Albano, Jr.
What Secretary Leonor Briones said:
“As the name itself states, it is an informal tool and will expectedly be administered without uniformity and with flexibility. It is not meant to be aggregated for reporting to the public. The aggregation by the Regional Office is only for its internal use, as a rough measure to partially inform its reading programs.
Among the proper large-scale assessments, with strict standards and controls, are the National Achievement Test (NAT) and the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) test.” DepEd Official Statement, February 19, 2020
What the 1987 Constitution says:
Section 28, Article II.. Subject to reasonable conditions prescribed by law, the State adopts and implements a policy of full public disclosure of all its transactions involving public interest.
What the DepEd Freedom of Information Manual says:
Section 4. Right to Information… Pursuant to these, every Filipino shall have access to information, official records, public records and documents and papers pertaining to official acts, transactions or decisions as well as government research data used as basis for policy development that are in the custody or under the control of the Department of Education.
Section 5. Exceptions. The Department shall deny access to information only when this information requested falls under any of the exemptions enshrined in the Constitution, existing laws or jurisprudence and specified in the inventory of exceptions embodied in the circular issued by the Office of the President pursuant to Section 4 of Executive Order No. 02, series of 2016.
My comment:
Who benefits if Phil-IRI results are withheld? Certainly not school children because they are the victims of the disgraceful inability of the DepEd to adequately accomplish its basic task of teaching beginning reading and the said problem cannot be remedied unless the facts are first presented. On that basis, it is clear that Secretary Briones was trying to pull a fast one when she said that Phil-IRI data is for DepEd use only.
Will the public interest be served if the DepEd continues to treat the national non-reader data for internal use only? Is not the alarming slippage in the DepEd’s ability to teach reading a matter of great public interest and a national concern that the entire country must be informed about? Shouldn’t public officials be informed of the prevailing quality of education in their LGUs? Shouldn’t parents be honestly informed about the matter so they could make enlightened decisions on whether to send their children to public or private schools? The DepEd should prove that the Phil-IRI results fall into the exceptions provided in Section 4 of Executive Order No. 02, series of 2016.
My foremost argument against this attempt of the DepEd to further cover up the non-reader problem is while the DepEd has been keeping the data internally, the number of non-readers and struggling readers has been expanding. Had the DepEd had the humility, honesty and maturity to admit that its policies and practices have resulted to the unprecedented proliferation of non-readers from Grade 2 upwards when the phenomenon was first observed, the problem would have been solved long time ago. We would not now have possibly hundreds of thousands of non-readers in our elementary and high schools and the country would not have been humiliated before the international community in the PISA. That’s because no well-meaning Filipino would want Filipino children to be learning to read later than they themselves have attained the skill which is Grade 1. Just imagine the ordinary parent who had studied in the elementary school in say the 90s when there were practically no non-readers in Grade 2 hearing that there are non-readers in high school. The resultant pressure would have forced the DepEd to take effective action solve the problem.
Ironically, it is now clear as day that the only people in the country who do not care whether or not our children learn to read at the proper grade are found in DepEd offices starting at their national headquarters, the regional offices except a few regions like Region 5 and the various field offices and of course, their allies and enablers. As you can see, they do not even want to give information on the actual situation so that others could act on the problem they pretend does not exist.
Clearly, DepEd can live with the non-reader problem because despite the fact it had been conducting the Phil-IRI since 2004 and have all the data it needs to come up with effective solutions to lick the phenomenon, the schools keep spawning non-readers and struggling readers. From the fact alone that if not for the media, the presence of non-readers in high school would still be a DepEd cherished secret, it can be concluded that the DepEd has no intent of getting rid of the problem. In effect, what Secretary Briones wants to happen is for the rest of the country to allow them at DepEd to continue mass producing non-readers without disturbance. **
