By Estanislao Albano, Jr.
Apparently, columnist Cielito Habito is unaware that malnutrition and the amount of funding for education practically have no impact on the viability of our basic education (“Our education disaster,” Philippine Daily Inquirer, April 6, 2021). Even granting that we could finally cope with the recommended 6 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) allocation for education and we could bring down malnutrition to manageable levels, we cannot rise one rank higher in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) simply because the root cause of our education disaster lies elsewhere.
In 2003 when we first joined the Grade 4 test of the TIMSS, the stunting among 5 year olds and below was 33.8 percent while our allocation for education as portion of the GDP was 2.9. In 2019, when the country took the test for the second time, the stunting incidence declined to 30.3 percent (2018 figure) and the allocation for education was larger by 1 point at 3.9. But even with the improvements in both indicators, the performance of our takers in 2019 was 61 points or 17.03 percent lower in Mathematics and 83 points or 25 percent in Science and they also placed last in both subjects against the 2003 group’s third to the last rank in both subjects.
In 2005, the education spending was 2.3 percent of the GDP and the stunting incidence was 32.9 percent versus the 2019 figures of 3.9 percent in allocation and 30.3 percent stunting rate. But the non-reader incidence skyrocketed from 1.74 percent in 2005 (“The Philippines country case study” by Rhona B. Caoli-Rodriguez 2007, published in the UNESDOC Digital Library) to the 27 percent for Grade 5 students uncovered in the 2019 Southeast Asian Primary Learning Metrics (SEA-PLM).
That Habito wrote that it is a little consolation that it was only in Reading Literacy that we were at the bottom in the PISA because we were second to the last in both Mathematics and Science is very strange considering that in his column “Doing education right” in the June 14, 2019 issue of this paper where he discussed the phenomenal ascent of Finland in the international basic education rankings, he wrote that based on PISA records, Finland became the best in Reading Literacy in 2000 then best in Mathematics in 2003 and then in Science in 2006.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the outfit behind the PISA, confirms the high correlation between performance in reading with success in other subjects as follows: “Reading is a prerequisite for successful performance in any school subject. By incorporating the three literacy domains of Mathematics, Reading and Science, PISA 2000 provides information on the relationships between the domains. The correlation between the Reading and Mathematics scores in PISA is 0.81, and the correlation between Reading and Science scores is 0.86. (“Reading for change: Performance and engagement across countries,” OECD, Page 15).
By therefore missing the significance of our tail-ending finish in reading after learning what keyed the Finland education success and then highlighting marginal factors of our education disaster, Habito unwittingly played into the hands of the DepEd which is desperately covering up the fact that it is our horrible reading literacy that has doomed our basic education.
Perhaps Habito was not aware that in 2018, we already had an expanding number of non-readers in high school (“Pag-asa sa Pagbasa,” GMA I-Witness documentary, September 1, 2018) thus, it was highly likely that a significant percentage of our PISA takers could not read and struggled to read which is very consistent with our dismal Reading Literacy result. The DepEd itself brought on the country the unprecedented and bizarre phenomenon of high school non-readers when it scrapped the traditional “No Read, No Move” Policy for Grade 1 in 2001 and later on totally stopped the practice of retaining pupils for failure to read in all grades (“Department of Education ‘to blame’ for reading crisis,” Philippine Daily Inquirer, April 26, 2019).
The experience of Finland and the above-stated finding of the OECD clearly tell us there is no way we can turn our education around and expect to improve our standing in the PISA for so long as we allow the DepEd to skirt, deny and refuse to act on the reason our reading literacy is in shambles. Since the beginning of mass education in the country until 2001 when the DepEd stopped retaining pupils in Grade1 due to inability to read, Filipino children have learned to read in English in Grade 1 in public schools. DepEd has no excuse whatsoever for mass producing non-readers because until now, private schools have no non-readers in Grade 2. Why? Private schools never abandoned the “No Read, No Move” Policy. **
