By Estanislao Albano, Jr.
The undersigned maintains that Objective No. 2 was intended to effect mass promotion. First, there will always be students who fail or discontinue their studies thus eliminating drop-outs and repetitions means passing even the ineligible. Second, the DepEd deliberately aligned with Objective No. 2 then existing policies which obstruct its attainment and has formulated policies which facilitate the achievement of the goal as follows:
a. The DepEd issued DepEd Order No. 45, s, 2002, barring the promotion of learners to Grade 4 unless they could read and, in so doing, effectively retired the traditional “No Read, No Move Policy” which did not allow the promotion of Grade 1 pupils unless and until they could read.
The reason the DepEd replaced the “No Read, No Move Policy” is obvious. Normally, there are children who fail to learn to read in Grade 1. To keep these laggards from being promoted was the very reason the education arm of the government maintained the “No Read, No Move Policy” for around a century. The policy therefore stands in the way of the attainment of Philippine EFA Objective No. 2 thus DepEd decided it had to go.
It would be ridiculous to claim that when the DepEd contemplated the issuance of DepEd Order No. 45, s. 2002, it was unaware that it was significantly weaker than the traditional “No Read, No Move Policy” as it is very obvious that an education system that makes all learners read in Grade 1 is superior to one which makes all learners only read in Grade 3 but nonetheless the agency issued the new reading policy.
The ultimate proof, however, that the true intent of DepEd Order No. 45, s. 2002, was to eliminate the incidence of repetitions which are unavoidable with the “No Read, No Move Policy” was the fact that the agency subsequently decided never to enforce the new policy but to instead allow non-readers and frustration readers to progress up the grades until Grade 10 and later on Grade 12.
DepEd cannot deny that since the scrapping of the “No Read, No Move Policy” illiteracy which never breached Grade 2 until then had crept up the grades to high school and that even after seeing the devasting impact of the change on literacy levels in public schools, the agency never thought of reinstating the time-tested reading policy until now.
The intentional removal of the “No Read, No Move Policy” and the DepEd’s refusal to restore it despite the resultant reading crisis is more than enough to debunk the claim that the practice of mass promotion is accidental.
Parenthetically, former Undersecretary Ramon Bacani who is now with SEAMEO Innotech can shed light on how come the DepEd scrapped the “No Read, No Move Policy” and had decided to never enforce DepEd Order No. 45, s. 2002, which replaced it as he was the signatory of the order and he stayed with the DepEd until 2010 and therefore is aware that the policy he issued was never applied.
b. As already mentioned, DepEd introduced grade transmutation or padding of grades through DepEd Order No. 8, s. 2015, and officially allowed the promotion to the next grade level of learners who failed in not more than two subjects through DepEd Order No. 13, s. 2018. Again, the obvious intention of these changes was to make passing and graduating easier so as not to jeopardize the attainment of zero drop-out and zero repetition rates.
c. Based on the guidelines of the Performance-based Bonus (PBB) specifically DepEd Order No. 12, s. 2013, DepEd Order No. 33, s. 2014, DepEd Order No. 30, s. 2015, and DepEd Order No. 56, s. 2016, DepEd is harnessing the PBB incentive program for the achievement of zero drop-out rate.
d. As of 2019, the DepEd already had solid evidence that the completion rate performance indicator is a fool’s gold but the agency still stubbornly persisted and persists in chasing the same.
In SY 2009-2010, the completion rate for the elementary level was 72 percent. On the other hand, the Grade 6 National Achievement Test (NAT) mean percentage score (MPS) was 68.01 percent. By 2018, the completion rate had vastly improved to 92 percent but the MPS had fallen to its lowest ever level at 37.44 percent. As the completion rate increased by 20 percentage points or 27.77 percent from 2010 to 2018, the MPS declined by 30.57 percentage points or 44.94 percent. Based on this data, the completion rate and NAT MPS are indirectly proportionate to each other.
The results of the 2018 PISA which was released in December 2019 validated the 2018 NAT results as only 20.37 percent of the country’s takers made Level 2, the minimum level of proficiency, across the three subjects. As already pointed out, the PISA Level 2 in reading is comparable to the grade level reading standard in the K to 12 Curriculum.**To be continued
