By Estanislao Albano, Jr.
Relative to your call to the Department of Education (DepEd) to release the nationwide Philippine Informal Reading Inventory (Phil-IRI) results which the agency is balking at, we strongly suggest that in lieu of said data, your office just ask for the number of non-readers and frustration level readers in Grade 7 in the last five school years. It is a common practice in public high schools to organize separate classes for these students as could be shown in the case of the Sauyo High School, Novaliches, Quezon City (“Pag-asa sa Pagbasa,” I Witness, GMA 7 September 1, 2018), the Pagasa National High School in Legazpi City (“70,000 Bicol pupils can’t read – DepEd,” Philippine Daily Inquirer, February 17, 2020) and Tabuk City National High School (“How Kalinga’s biggest high school copes with reading woes,” Manila Times, March 12, 2020).
Unlike in the case of the Phil-IRI non-reader data for the elementary grades, the DepEd cannot quibble over the Grade 7 non-reader statistics. While national education officials led by Secretary Leonor Briones did their best to minimize and discredit the Philippine Daily Inquirer expose on the Bicol reading mess, they conspicuously did not say one word about the part of the story where the principal of Pagasa National High School declared that 37 of their more than 600 Grade 7 students were non-readers. The DepEd officials did not realize that all their efforts to gloss over the thousands of non-readers in the elementary grades in Bicol were for naught since the report showed there are Grade 7 non-readers in a school in the center of the region.
For good measure, we cite the case of Baguio City where the school officials revealed that for school year 2019-2020, they have 52 Grade 7 non-readers (“Filipino subject top among Grade 6, 10 Baguio learners,” Baguio Midland Courier, November 24, 2019). This is very telling considering that Baguio City is one of the top schools divisions, of the entire country based performance in assessment tests. The Cordillera Administrative Region (CAR) topped the Grade 6 National Achievement Test (NAT) in 2016 and 2017 (the DepEd is withholding the nationwide results for 2019) and was fourth among the regions in the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and Baguio City is the hands down top division of the region.
Given these Grade 7 non-reader data out in the open and with at least six DepEd regional offices having admitted they have high school non-readers, there simply is no way that the abnormality could be hidden. Nonetheless, to ensure the integrity of the data, we e strongly suggest that the report be under oath. **
