By Estanislao Albano, Jr.
Congress and the Second Congressional Commission on Education (EDCOM II) should resolve the reading crisis, which is again at the center of public discussion due to the finding of the Philippine Statistics Authority that 21 percent of senior high school graduates are functionally illiterate, sans the participation of the Department of Education (DepEd). The following facts conclusively prove the agency does not have the intention nor the competence to get the job done:
First, despite the fact that the DepEd has been conducting the Philippine Informal Reading Inventory (Phil-IRI) reading assessment test twice a year since 2004, it has never released any reading literacy data.
It is ironic that as the country grapples with the reading crisis and needs all available information to come up with effective solutions, the DepEd determinedly withholds Phil-IRI results. It can also be reasonably assumed that had the DepEd been releasing Phil-IRI data, the reading crisis could have been averted as the rest of society specially government bodies concerned with proper delivery of basic education could have responded earlier.
Second, between 2016 to 2024, at least 75 action researches on reading laggards in the secondary were conducted by teachers through the DepEd’s Basic Education Research Fund (BERF). The participants were currently enrolled non-readers and frustration level readers. Although the BERF is described as “a grant provided by the DepEd to support education research in aid of evidence-based policy formulation,” not a single policy on reading literacy emanated from the studies.
Third, in 2019, the DepEd snubbed the recommendation of the Philippine Institute for Development Studies, the state think tank, that it stops its practice of sending non-readers to high school. There are tons of evidence that the practice persists including the recent admission of Undersecretary Gina Gonong that there are non-readers in Grades 7-10 clearly proving that the DepEd does not care about the spread of illiteracy in the secondary.
Fourth, none of the literacy interventions of the DepEd works. If they were effective, then the country would not now be staring in the face this reality that from 2019 to 2024, based on senior high school enrolment figures for SY 2021-2022 and SY 2022-2023, some 1.5 M senior high school graduates are functionally illiterate.
Too, in 2024, the EDCOM II had deemed the new reading intervention programs inadequate proof of which it had urged the DepEd to “suspend the regular academic program for 8-12 weeks and implement an effective learning recovery program for K to 12 learners to ensure that they attain functional literacy and numeracy.”
Congress and EDCOM II should rather look to private schools and to the 1991 EDCOM for guidance in the rehabilitation of literacy in our basic education system.
In reading in the 2022 Programme for International Student Assessment, private school students outscored public school students 416 to 333, or by 83 points. Had the two groups been ranked separately, the former would have been in 49th place while the latter would have ranked 80th, or second to the last, for a gap of 31 notches.
Generally, private schools make their students read in Grade 1 with the weakest of the institutions not allowing non-readers to go beyond Grade 3. On the other hand, public schools welcome non-readers even in senior high school.
In its EDCOM II Year Two Report, the EDCOM II reported that the 1991 EDCOM had recommended creating and administering the National Achievement Test to evaluate functional literacy by the end of Grade 4 among other purposes.
It is clear that the 1991 EDCOM was confident that Grade 4 pupils can be functionally literate. The target was realistic because at that time, the “No Read, No Move Policy” which bars the promotion of Grade 1 pupils unless and until they could read was still in place thus all Grade 2 pupils then were already basically literate.
Tragically, however, for reasons it still has to reveal, the DepEd scrapped the “No Read, No Move Policy” in 2002 opening wide our basic education system to illiteracy eventually leading to this unprecedented and unacceptable phenomenon of millions of learners spending 12 years in school still ending up functionally illiterate.
