By Estanislao Albano, Jr.
There is no DepEd document showing that the two policies have been rescinded. Every year, the DepEd central office indirectly acknowledges the current status of DECS Order No. 34, s. 2001, and DepEd Order No. 45, s. 2002, when it includes the administration of the Phil-IRI among the school activities for the school year such as what it did in DepEd Order No. 012, s. 2025, for SY 2025-2026 onwards.
As added proofs that DepEd Order No. 45, s. 2002, is standing, from 2018 to 2024, the following DepEd field offices issued their own “No Read, No Move Policy” which explicitly cite DepEd Order No. 45, s. 2002, as basis: DepEd-CAR (Regional Memorandum No. 013.2020); DepEd-Region 10 (Regional Memorandum No. 153, s. 2020); DepEd-Cabuyao City Schools Division (Memorandum No. 537, s. 2023); DepEd-Batangas Schools Division (Memorandum No. 013, s. 2024); DepEd-Dagupan City Schools Division (Memorandum No. 99, s. 2024).
Given that the K to 12 Curriculum provides that pupils read in Filipino in Grade 1 and in English in Grade 3, DECS Order No. 34, s. 2001, clears Grade 2 of pupils who cannot read in Filipino and Grade 4 of pupils who cannot read in English. As for DepEd Order No. 45, s. 2002, it assures that there are no reading laggards in Grade 4. In other words, the reading crisis would never have happened were both or even just one of the policies were being enforced as illiteracy would be confined to the first three grades and therefore manageable unlike now that even high school is inundated with reading laggards. But unfortunately for the country, the DepEd never enforced these policies.
The refusal of the DepEd to enforce DepEd Order No. 45, s. 2002, is deliberate. As early as 2006, the highest echelon of the DepEd was already aware of the effect of promoting reading laggards. Then Secretary Jesli Lapus had implicitly admitted that one reason for the declining literacy during that period was the non-implementation of the “no promotion beyond Grade 3 for non-readers” policy. In his presentation of the proposed 2007 DepEd budget, Lapus had included the enforcement of the “no promotion beyond Grade 3 for non-readers” policy as one of the ways of building foundational skills “for learning how to learn” among Grades 1-3 pupils (“Education For All: A Functionally-Literate Philippines!”).
But for unknown reasons, Lapus himself did not enforce the policy and neither did former Secretaries Armin Luistro, Leonor Briones and Sara Duterte proof of which instead of diminishing, the incidence of illiteracy among elementary and secondary students only escalated during their watches right under their very noses.
The reference to the “no promotion beyond Grade 3 for non-readers” made by Lapus in 2006 is the only known instance when DepEd Order No. 45, s. 2002, was publicly cited by a national official of the DepEd.
In refusing to enforce DECS Order No. 34, s. 2001, and DepEd Order No. 45, s. 2002, the DepEd is in effect approving the mass promotion of reading laggards. And since it has been incontrovertibly proven by its refusal to apply the two policies that it is indirectly sanctioning the passing of learners who have not acquired the fundamental skill, it follows that neither does DepEd object to the advancement of learners who have not attained the other competencies. In short, DepEd is the moving force behind the mass promotion practice.
2. The assertion that mass promotion is just confined to “some areas” is preposterous because for
years now, there already were overwhelming empirical evidences that the DepEd is passing
learners who have not attained the prescribed competencies of their grades nationwide.
a. The learning poverty rate of the country which stood at 69.5 percent in 2019 and 90.9 percent as of 2022. Bulk of Filipino 10-year olds are Grade 5 with a minority in Grade 4. Since under the
grade level standards in the K to 12 Curriculum, learners are supposed to be reading in English
with comprehension by Grade 3 (English Curriculum Guide, page 53), learners who consist the country’s learning poverty rate have been mass promoted in Grades 3 and 4.
b. Finding of the 2022 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) that 76 percent of the Filipino takers fell below Level 2 proficiency in reading meaning they were functionally illiterate.
The PISA Level 2 proficiency in reading is the threshold of functional literacy based on the following description: “At Level 2, students begin to demonstrate the capacity to use their reading skills to acquire knowledge and solve a wide range of practical problems. (“PISA 2018 Results (Volume I): What Students Know and Can Do,” Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), page 89). On the other hand, under the learning standards of the K to 12 Curriculum, learners are supposed to be functionally literate by Grade 6 (English Curriculum Guide, page 125).
Since per Figure 1.3.3 of “PISA 2018 Results (Volume I): What Students Know and Can Do,” Filipino takers were distributed in Grades 7-11, those who consist the 76 percent were mass promoted at least once to a maximum of five times. More than three-fourths of the Grades 7-11 population is not just “some places.”
This is also true for the 2018 PISA when 80 percent of the Filipino takers were found to be functionally illiterate because literacy standards of the Basic Education Curriculum could not be weaker than the K to 12 Curriculum which means that with the release of the 2018 PISA results in 2019, the DepEd already had solid evidence that mass promotion is a nationwide reality three years before EDCOM II was convened.
**To be continued
