By Estanislao Albano, Jr.
(Note: This piece written in March 2021 is a bit of history. The usage of mother tongue as medium of instruction in Grades 1-3 has been discontinued through Republic Act No. 12027 which was enacted in 2024.But three years before the passage of the law, the DepEd-CAR already tried to bolt the program on grounds that it was close to impossible to implement it in a multi-lingual locality like the Cordillera. It never cited the results of the National Achievement Test (NAT) as proof of the harm being done by the Mother Tongue-based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE) in the education of Cordillera children though.)
During the meeting of the technical working group created to assist the House Committee on Basic Education and Culture in the consideration of House Bill No. 6405, a measure which sought the abolition of the MTB-MLE authored by Baguio City Rep. Marquez Go, on March 19, 2021, Department of Education-Cordillera Administrative Region (DepEd-CAR) Director Estela Cariño, in an unprecedented move in the notoriously hierarchical agency, dared to publicly break rank by proposing that the Cordillera return to using English and Filipino as media of instruction from Kindergarten to Grade 3 except in areas where there is one community language understood by all school children.
Cariño said that the presence of too many languages in the region renders the implementation of the MTB-MLE extremely difficult explaining that Iloko, the official mother tongue of the region, is not the first language of most learners and even of many teachers in the locality. She added that neither has the permission to utilize community languages solved the problem because not all learners and teachers speak the community language.
Results of the National Achievement Test (NAT) solidly support the proposal.
First, if it’s true as claimed by MTB-MLE exponents that children learn best in the mother tongue and logically, would learn less effectively in Filipino and English, then the CAR should have done poorly in the NAT it being home to at least 80 indigenous cultural communities all of whom have their distinct dialects. The truth, however, is the CAR thrived under the Bilingual Education Policy (BEP) as could be shown by the NAT results after the assessment test was purged of cheating in 2016 (which is another subject altogether). The region topped the Grade 6 NAT in 2016 and 2017 and ranked second to the NCR in Grade 10 NAT in 2017. (The CAR was not one of the four regions tested in Grade 10 in 2016.) The region also placed fourth overall among local regions in the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment.
However, in 2018 when the first MTB-MLE batch took the Grade 6 NAT, the region’s overall mean percentage score (MPS) fell by a hefty 5.47 or 12.05 percent.
Second, if it’s true Filipino children need to be bridged to new languages by their mother tongues, then for the same reason stated above, CAR learners should have struggled in the Filipino and English subjects under the BEP. The truth was the region topped the English subject in the Grade 6 NAT in 2016 and 2017 and was second in Grade 10 NAT in 2017.
However, with the severe marginalization of English in the MTB-MLE Curriculum practically withdrawing the public schools’ role in the early development of skills in the language, the region’s first MTB-MLE products scored 9.91 points or 20.4 percent less than the last BEP batch in English. This is more than thrice the 2.99 setback it incurred in 2011, the previous record. (I excluded the 26.65 loss in 2016 from the reckoning because this was caused by an upheaval in the Grade 6 NAT affecting all regions and all subjects and not an ordinary year to year fluctuation.)
In Filipino, the CAR was second only to the NCR in Grade 6 NAT in 2016 and 2017 and likewise in the Grade 10 NAT in 2017, in a tie with Region 4A, beating even the other Tagalog-speaking regions.
Based on the results of the NAT, Filipino was the best learned subject in the region in Grade 6 by a wide margin and in Grade 10 by a narrower difference. The Filipino subject’s domination of the NAT is true nationwide from 2016 to 2018 in both Grade 6 and Grade 10 NAT with the exception of the 2016 Grade 10 NAT where only four regions were tested.
These data shows that Filipino is the subject our school children all over the country learn the easiest and starting at the earliest possible time belying the assertion of the DepEd and other MTB-MLE advocates that our pupils need to learn their mother tongue first in order to successfully acquire additional languages including Filipino. In fact, the first batch that passed the MTB-MLE bridge scored 2.28 points or 4.26 percent less than the last BEP learners in Filipino. **
