By Estanislao Albano, Jr.
In both its first and second year reports, the Second Congressional Commission on Education (EDCOM II) was mum on its mandate to make “the Philippines globally competitive in both education and labor markets” (Section 4, RA No. 11899). What it only said in the EDCOM II Year Two Report is that in its third and final year, it remains fully committed to its mandate to deliver “a roadmap with clear key performance indicators and results framework to address the learning crisis,” with “short-term and long-term policy and program recommendations.” No word about attaining global competitiveness.
The omission is just as well because what EDCOM II so far reported in its first two reports could not make our public schools students compete with students of even our weakest private schools let alone with students of countries with education authorities who know what they are doing.
In its EDCOM II Year Two Report, the commission stated that one of its pressing goals is to ensure “that every learner achieves foundational literacy by the end of Grade 3” (page 44). This is ridiculous because the actual practice among local private schools is to make learners read in Grade 1. The practice clearly impacted the reading results of the 2022 Programme for International Student Assessment. Public school students scored 333 points while private schools students obtained 416 points for a difference of 83 points or 24.92 percent.
The EDCOM II target is not an improvement on the K to 12 Curriculum wherein students are supposed to be reading in mother tongue by Grade 1, in Filipino by Grade 2 and in English by Grade 3. It only looks better than the curriculum because in actual practice, as EDCOM II itself witnessed recently, the DepEd allows non-readers in high school.
Three pages of the report was allotted to what the EDCOM II thinks are the keys to the highly successful education system of Vietnam based on its benchmarking tour last March. Conspicuously, they did not mention that one of the cornerstones of the Vietnam’s solid education system is their Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) makes sure that at the end of Grade 1, all learners already read and write fluently otherwise they will repeat the grade.
MOET Director of Primary Education Thai Van Tai pointed out in the article “Teaching before 1st grade is unscientific” (Vietnam.VN news website, May 17, 2023) that in the new Grade 1 program, “schools and primary teachers have more time to help students consolidate to meet the requirements that students need to achieve when completing the 1st grade program, which is reading and writing fluently.” Primary students who are assessed as “incomplete” at the end of the school year even in just one subject are retained unless they could hurdle the evaluation after their summer remedial classes (“More than 52,000 students have not completed grade 1 as ‘normal’” (VnExpress, July 26, 2023).
Appallingly, neither does the EDCOM II know that prior to the DepEd era, just like in Vietnam, our public schools also made the acquisition of reading skills in Grade 1 a must. Under the traditional “No Read, No Move” policy, Filipino Grade 1 pupils were given a choice: learn to read or repeat the grade. The outcome was similar to what is being experienced in Vietnam: for a century, the Philippines also had no illiterates in Grade 2. That was until the DepEd insanely discarded the policy in 2002.
Clearly, the era when our public schools were known as “perhaps the best in Asia” (“Back to His Roots,” Forbes website, April 28, 2011), and “model of public education” in the region (“Education: Mirror of a deeper crisis,” Philippine Daily Inquirer, February 4, 2024) would not have been possible if not for the “No Read, No Move” policy because where literacy goes, so goes the education system.
Backed up by hundreds of researchers and education experts, EDCOM II is clueless there was a time our public schools successfully taught children to read in Grade 1, or two years before the target it is recommending. It should do its assignment and change its silly, pathetic, ironic and retrogressive recommendation. **
