By Estanislao Albano, Jr.
According to RA No. 7165, as amended by RA No. 10122, the Literacy Coordinating Council (LCC), the inter-agency body tasked to coordinate all literacy efforts in the country, is supposed to come up with measures to enable “the monitoring and evaluation of the literacy situation in the country.”
But 14 years after the passage of RA No. 10122, the LCC has yet to comply with the mandate such that if the uninitiated visit its website, they would not suspect that the country has the 11th worst learning poverty rate in the world and was last then 76th of 81 countries in reading in the 2018 and 2022 rounds of the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa), respectively. The only literacy data available in the website are the results of the Functional Literacy, Education and Mass Media Survey (FLEMMS) which are too good to be true in the light of the results of international students assessments. The latest FLEMMS (2019) alleges that 96.5 percent of 10 year old and above Filipinos are basic literate and that 91.6 percent of 10-64 year old Filipinos are functional literate.
There’s no reference to learning poverty in the website. Neither is there any report on the literacy performance of our students in the Pisa and also in the Southeast Asia Primary Learning Metrics where our Grade 5 learners placed second to the last in reading.
Most shocking of all, the LCC does not recognize the results of the Philippine Informal Reading Inventory (Phil-IRI), the reading assessment test which the Department of Education (DepEd) administers twice a year since 2004, as relevant in the determination of the country’s literacy situation. There is no Phil-IRI data in the website.
In fact, it is only in the 2020 Annual Report that the reading test is mentioned in the website.
Had the LCC, instead of dismissing the Phil-IRI as irrelevant, treated it as a useful tool in the monitoring and evaluation of the literacy situation, there would have been a good chance that this reading crisis has been averted. That’s because as early as 2006 before the DepEd started hiding Phil-IRI results, the reading test already sounded the alarm on the deteriorating literacy levels in public schools. For instance, the pre-test conducted in Cebu City in SY 2006-2007 showed that of 72,751 pupils from Grades 2 to 6, 2,531 were non-readers and 54,787 frustration level readers. Such illiteracy levels were previously unknown and unthinkable in our education system.
Had the LCC demanded from the DepEd the nationwide Phil-IRI results from then on and had included the data in its mandatory annual report to Congress and disseminated the same to the public all in furtherance of its mandate to totally eradicate illiteracy, the DepEd would have been forced to act accordingly on whatever were causing the rapid decline in literacy among our students.
The LCC should explain why it deems the literacy data produced by its lead agency which also happens to be the foremost literacy agent in the country unfit for purposes of the proper monitoring and evaluation of the country’s literacy situation. If there are observed flaws in the tool, the DepEd could easily make the adjustments specially so it is the most concerned being the lead agency in the council.
But even in its current state, if the purpose is the formulation of policy recommendations on how to beat the rampant illiteracy in public elementary and high schools, the Phil-IRI is still useful. Take the case of the SY 2018-2019 English Phil-IRI pre-test data submitted to Senator Sherwin Gatchalian which placed the non-readers and the frustration readers among the 3.6M Grades 4-6 students at 3 percent and 40 percent, respectively. For one, the data can adequately underpin the recommendation that the DepEd strictly implement the grade-level reading standards because the presence of that large number of reading laggards in Grade 4 onwards slows down the learning pace of entire classes as the unfortunate students cannot keep up with the lessons and likewise, the teaching of beginning reading steals much of the time of the teachers. (Published in Letters of the January 31, 2025 Philippine Daily Inquirer)
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