By Estanislao Albano, Jr.
The proposal of the Philippine Business for Education (PBED) for the creation of an national autonomous assessment agency “separate from the DepEd” discussed by former Education Secretary Edilberto de Jesus in his column “Reviving the Education Nation movement” in the October 2, 2021 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer deserves the support of all Filipinos concerned about the tanking of our basic education. That’s because the absence of any mechanism through which the rest of the country can check what’s going on in the Department of Education (DepEd) specially the quality of its outputs has reinforced the veil of secrecy and silence over the real condition of our basic education leading to its virtual collapse so clearly established by our tail-ending finishes in the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the 2019 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS).
For one, the reading crisis would have been averted had the conduct of the Philippine Informal Reading Inventory (Phil-IRI), the reading assessment tool of the DepEd, been placed in the hands of an independent agency. As one of the support mechanisms of the “Every Child a Reader Program,” the DepEd’s flagship reading program, one of the purposes of the Phil-IRI is to identify the learners who will be retained pursuant to the policy of the ECARP that “every child should be a reader by Grade 3 and that no pupil shall be promoted to the next higher grade unless he/she manifests mastery of basic literacy skills” (DepEd Memorandum No. 324, series of 2004). What’s happening, however, is the DepEd maintains the ECARP and continues to conduct the Phil-IRI every year but the number of non-readers and struggling readers only keeps multiplying. (Please see “DepEd’s failure to teach basic skills reaches only as far back as Arroyo era,” Opinion, Philippine Daily Inquirer, August 10, 2021).
As glaring proofs of the DepEd’s contempt for truth about our basic education and for the country’s right to know such truths, it was the media which brought the problem of non-readers out in the open in 2018. The proliferation of non-readers in our schools has been going on for years and has already affected the high school ranks but, irony of ironies, the DepEd kept the problem a secret such that not one individual in the nearly million-member bureaucracy was concerned enough to blow the lid off the disgrace.
Relative to the comment of De Jesus that the DepEd has yet to report on the performance of the first batch of senior high schools who graduated in 2018 or three years ago, up until now, the agency has yet to make public even just their average score in the Basic Education Exit Assessment (BEEA), the Grade 12 equivalent of the National Achievement Test (NAT), which happens to be a pathetic 36.71 percent. The historical event did not merit even just a brief press statement and there is no reference to it in the DepEd website whatsoever. Ditto with the results of 2019 BEEA which was even worse at 36.45 percent. The results of the two exams were available in June 2018 and June 2019, respectively, and could have been published in the said years’ Philippine Statistical Yearbooks for public consumption but they were not.
How can the DepEd arrest the slide of our basic education if it cavalierly disregards the results of its own reading assessment tests thereby overthrowing the very objective of its reading program to stop the promotion of illiterates to keep Grade 4? How can the rest of the Philippine society specially the policymakers participate in shoring up our battered basic education if the DepEd hides assessment data and only release them on the sly after a while when they feel the coast is already clear? The agency only publicized the results of 2016 and 2017 NATs in the 2019 Philippine Statistical Yearbook which came out at the end of 2019 or two years and one year delayed, respectively. These formidable DepEd-created stumbling blocks to the recovery of our basic education can be solved with the establishment of an independent assessment agency.
If the proposal will not prosper because for one, the DepEd and its enablers will surely move heaven and earth to block it, my two cents is for the PBED to organize a watchdog analogous to the National Citizens’ Movement for Free Elections to ensure that DepEd assessment tests are honestly and seriously conducted with the results thereof promptly reported to the public and utilized as intended. It’s high time to put an end to the reign of incest and obscurantism in the DepEd otherwise we have not yet seen the worst state of our basic education. (Rejected letter to the editor to the Philippine Daily Inquirer)**
