By Estanislao Albano, Jr.
In the Department of Education (DepEd) Matatag Curriculum, there’s a Reading and Literacy subject in Grade 1. This is obviously aimed at arresting the country’s reading crisis.
But the inclusion of a reading subject in Grade 1 is no guarantee that all learners will start reading in Grade 1 unless the EDCOM 2 or Congress or Malacañang could compel the DepEd to stop mass promotion, its practice of advancing learners to the next grade even if they have not attained the competencies of their current grade.
Mass promotion disabled the reading programs of the 2003 Basic Education Curriculum and the K-12 curriculum.
Under the BEC, schoolchildren were taught to read in Grade 1 but the timetable was ditched through the replacement of the traditional “No Read, No Move” policy under which a Grade 1 pupil could not be promoted to Grade 2 unless he could read. This was done through the inception in 2001 of the Every Child A Reader Program (ECARP), which pushed the reading cutoff to Grade 3. Eventually, however, DepEd opted to also set aside the ECARP reading cut off, thus giving birth to the practice of mass promotion as non-readers could already be promoted to Grade 2 all the way to high school.
That’s the reason that by 2005, the country had an elementary school non-reader and frustration reader rates of 1.74 percent and 20.75 percent, respectively.
That’s also the reason why 80 percent of our examinees in the 2018 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) fell below Level 2 in reading proficiency. According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the entity behind the PISA, Level 2 is the juncture when “students begin to demonstrate the capacity to use their reading skills to acquire knowledge and solve a wide range of practical problems.” Meaning, 80 percent of our PISA examinees, although already in high school, were not competent readers.
Were the DepEd only promoting those who attained the corresponding competencies of their grade levels, these reading laggards would not have reached high school.
As for the K-12 curriculum reading literacy program, the DepEd document “Education for All 2015 National Review Report” states: “In line with the K-12 program, ECARP aims for all children to be able to read in mother tongue by the end of Grade 1, in Filipino by the end of Grade 2 and in English by the end of Grade 3.” The truth of the matter, however, is it was during the implementation of the K-12 curriculum that the reading crisis exploded.
The World Bank report that our learning poverty or portion of 10-year-olds who could not read and understand simple texts stood at 90.9 percent as of 2022 is a smoking gun on mass promotion. Ten-year-olds are in Grade 5, long past the ECARP Grade 3 reading cut off.
If the EDCOM 2 or Congress or Malacañang cannot stop the DepEd from mass promoting, the reading crisis will only escalate because, as shown by the PISA and WB literacy data, if they have a choice, Filipino schoolchildren would indefinitely postpone learning to read. If mass promotion remains, the DepEd can revise the curriculum every year and the EDCOM 2 can come up with all the reforms it could think of but all will be futile because non-readers and frustration readers will continue to overwhelm our education system.
While it allows the DepEd to accommodate non-readers in all grades all the way to high school like the agency is presently doing, the EDCOM 2 in particular has no credibility to talk about reforming Philippine basic education.
(This piece was published in the September 7, 2023 issue of the Philippine Star. But of course it fell on deaf ears such that as has been usual since SY 2002-2003, at the end of SY 2023-2024, all non-readers and struggling readers from Grade 1 to Grade 11 have been promoted and those in Grade 12 absurdly allowed to graduate. Please search my piece “We have senior high school graduates who cannot read.” Regarding the Reading and Literacy subject in Grade 1 in the Matatag Curriculum, if the DepEd decides to promote Grade 1 pupils who fail to learn to read to Grade 2 which is very likely and may have already happened as the curriculum was piloted in some schools last school year, we will be treated to the Guinness Book of World Records-level absurdity of non-readers successfully passing a Reading and Literacy subject. Only in the Philippines in the era of DepEd in fairness to all previous education officials of the country all the way back to the American period who all saw to it that Grade 1 pupils got stuck in Grade 1 if they failed or refused to learn to read.)
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