By Estanislao Albano, Jr.
In the ANC program “Headstart” on December 10, 2019, Secretary Leonor Briones praised the NCR, Region 7 and the CAR for ranking high among local regions in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). She said the better performance of CAR and Region 7 in Reading Literacy – they were third and second, respectively – was because children in the two regions learn to speak English at a very young age.
Later when host Karen Davila asked what explains the higher scores of Regions 7 and 6 in Mathematics in the PISA (actually, they were fourth and sixth among the regions in the subject, respectively), the latter said: “We grew up speaking in English.”
The statement knocks out the untenable claim of those peddling the Mother Tongue-based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE) that Filipino children need to be bridged to English and Filipino by their mother tongue. That’s because if the children in the three regions can learn English early, there is no reason other Filipino children could not do the same given the same opportunity. In fact, the general observation is in no time in history were Filipino school children more dumb in English than under the MTB-MLE.
In 2016, CAR and Region 7 ranked first and second in English in the Grade 6 National Achievement Test (NAT), respectively, and in 2017, first and third places, respectively,
But with the adoption of the MTB-MLE all but stopping the participation of the school system in the early introduction and development of children in English, the CAR and Region 7’s facility with the language is now under siege. In 2018 when the first MTB-MLE batch took the Grade 6 NAT, CAR registered a loss of 9.91 or 20.4 percent and Region 7 8.38 or 19.41percent, respectively, of their previous year’s score. (I only have the 2018 English scores for the two regions as the DepEd central office refuses to release the nationwide results of the NAT.)
The CAR, and Regions 7 and 6 students the Secretary Briones praised for scoring higher among our takers in the 2018 PISA were elementary school products of Bilingual Education Policy, the old language policy (Figure 1.3.3, Page 52 of “PISA 2018 Results, the 2018 PISA Report”).
When asked by Davila that since English proficiency was a factor in the PISA performance of Filipino children, if she would recommend a return to English as medium of instruction, Briones answered: “It could be English and also the mother tongue because the mother tongue is very helpful in adjusting to school, separation from parents and family, to language, to reading and so on and so forth.”
This only shows that the MTB-MLE has absolutely nothing by way of actual gains in the original purposes as stated in DepEd Order No. 74, series of 2009, and in the Mother Tongue Curriculum Guide so Briones and other advocates of the MTB-MLE have to fall back on the claims of the MTB-MLE as though nine years have not already passed since its launching with the state of our education rapidly retrogressing as punctuated by our bottom finish in the 2019 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study and close to the bottom ranking in the 2019 Southeast Asia Primary Learning Metrics (SEA-PLM).
There is nothing in the original DepEd MTB-MLE literature about smooth adjustment to school and separation anxiety. Briones makes it appear to the uninitiated that the MTB-MLE has made gains in language when as shown above, the English scores of the regions traditional performing in the English plunged when the MTB-MLE pioneer products took the NAT. How could the MTB-MLE be helping in reading when the non-reader population has ballooned to millions during its implementation? The SEA-PLM found that 27 percent of our Grade 5 students could not read. Extrapolated, with our public elementary population at over 10M, the figure means millions of non-readers under the MTB-MLE.
Briones was talking about the alleged benefits of the MTB-MLE but did not clarify that such were not delivered and not being delivered until now.
When officials start mouthing ridiculous things and pies in the sky to justify the continuing implementation of a government activity, you can be sure that this program is an utter dud. **
