By Estanislao Albano, Jr.
There is no escaping the very strong correlation between reading competence and academic success. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the body behind the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa), confirms the link thus: “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).
The phenomenon was strikingly demonstrated in the country’s results in the 2018 Pisa where the sequences in the reading literacy and overall rankings of the regions were almost identical. (“PISA 2018 Philippine National Report,” DepEd).
This means that the country’s education crisis can only be resolved if the reading crisis is first successfully dealt with. It is a warning to DepEd and both houses of Congress to stop deluding themselves that the education crisis can be solved while skirting the reading literacy mess.
On December 4, 2019, in her presentation “Situating PISA within Sulong EduKalidad,” Education Secretary Leonor Briones shared the Department of Education (DepEd) finding on the results of the Pisa that our students are very poor in reading in English and that this “may affect” their performance in Mathematics and Science. She then directed the conduct of further study on the issue.
Almost two years later, the DepEd has not yet bared the results of the study and neither has it come up with effective solutions to the problem. But obviously, the agency is evading the real causes of the weakness because in the first place, these factors need no digging up as they are so plain to see.
How could anyone with minimum knowledge of the country’s basic education history let alone DepEd insiders miss the fact that it was after the agency decided in 2001 to scrap the policy of retaining pupils in Grade 1 until they could read and, more than that, to no longer hold any student in any grade on account of inability to read that our elementary and high schools became hotbeds of illiteracy?
Neither does it take much IQ to figure out that with all things equal, a child who begins to learn reading in English in Grade 2 cannot read as well in the language than one who learned the skill in Grade 1. Due to the Mother Tongue policy (although this was not yet at play in the PISA), the K to 12 Curriculum only introduces reading in English in the second semester of Grade 2 in contrast with past curricula which taught the skill in Grade 1.
Since obviously, children who could not read are not ready to take any exams, these harebrained policies of the DepEd did us in in the Southeast Asia Primary Learning Metrics (SEA-PLM) and the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). More than a quarter of our examinees in both large-scale studies could not read and those among them who could read were reading in the test language one year and half behind the other examinees were reading in theirs.
As for Congress, we have been pleading with them through streams of letters to probe the reading crisis since September 18, 2018 for the Senate and August 23, 2019 for the House to no avail. I have also slammed the Senate several times on this page for avoiding the issue like the plague (“Senate should look into worsening reading crisis in PH,” June 6, 2019, among others) but apparently, our senators are determined to leave the reading crisis alone.
DepEd and Congress can make noises and actions supposedly to address the education crisis all they like but if they dodge the reading crisis and its real causes, we will still be stuck in the bottom of the international assessments we join because reading proficiency is a prerequisite to education competitiveness. Only the dumb and self-deluded believe otherwise.**
