By Estanislao C. Albano Jr.
non-readers.”
It is implied in RA No. 7165, the law creating the Literacy Coordinating Council (LCC) in 1991, that at that time, the then Department of Education, Culture and Sports was satisfactorily fulfilling its function of teaching reading. It is clear in Section 1 that the coverage of the law which sought to totally eradicate illiteracy were illiterate people who could not attend school as the learning programs it prescribed to attain the goal are carried out outside of schools.
Although by the time the law was amended in 2010 the capacity of the Department of Education (DepEd) to teach reading had already unraveled the fact that as early as 2006, non-readers were already detected in a public high school in Quezon City, RA No. 10122 retained the outside of formal education purview of RA No. 7165.
Taking advantage of the law’s oversight, even after 80 percent of our students failed to make the minimum reading proficiency level in the Programme for International Student Assessment 2018 and the World Bank reported that the country had 90.9 percent learning poverty rate in 2022, the LCC brazenly maintains that the dismal record of the DepEd in teaching reading is not a cause for concern relative to the attainment of universal literacy in the country.
The DepEd’s near total failure in imparting the basic literacy is never raised in LCC proceedings. In fact, it is only in its 2022 LCC Annual Report that the council made a grudging and glancing reference to the reading crisis in public schools by listing “Increased number of struggling/frustrated readers” among the roadblocks to universal literacy. Note that it even avoided the term “non-readers.”
That’s even if the respondents of the action research “Distance Learning for Learners with Reading Difficulties,” one of the 95 researches listed in the LCC website, were 30 Grades 7-10 non-readers.
Among the most cringe-worthy results of the LCC’s shameless refusal to admit that the brunt of the effort to totally eradicate illiteracy had already shifted to the public elementary and high school classrooms are the trophies proclaiming local government units (LGUs) as literacy champions despite the fact that schools in their jurisdictions are bursting with non-readers handed out during the council’s biennial National Literacy Awards (NLA).
In the 2024 NLA held December 12, Butuan City copped the top honors in the highly urbanized/ independent city sub-category of the Outstanding Local Government Unit category for the third time in a row. In SY 2021-2022, there were 886 non-readers and 17,795 frustration readers in Grades 4-10 in public schools in the city (“‘Brigada Pagbasa’ resolves learners’ difficulty in reading,” Philippine Information Agency website, August 3, 2023).
Dagupan City is the third placer in the sub-category. DepEd-Dagupan City was one of the five schools divisions which issued “No Read, No Pass” policies in 2023 and 2024. Issuing a “No Read, No Pass” memorandum is a desperate option of DepEd field offices which are up to their necks with illiteracy in their schools courtesy of the DepEd mass promotion practice whereby inability to read is no bar from promotion even to Grade 12.
The most devastating and ironic impact of the LCC’s coddling of the DepEd is that after Congress, through the passage of RA No. 10122 in 2010, strengthened the LCC to accomplish its mandate to universalize literacy, illiteracy completed its invasion of high school with non-readers reaching Grade 12. In the case of one senior high school in Cagayan de Oro City, the sad event in the history of our basic education took place in SY 2018-2019 per an action research funded under the Basic Education Research Fund, the DepEd’s research program.
That was bound to happen because placing the agency whose folly and incompetence have led to pervasive illiteracy in our public schools atop the council mandated by law to “Act as the overall advisory and coordinating body, providing policy and program directions for all literacy endeavors in the country” is like entrusting the management and control of prisons to the prisoners. (Published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer January 6, 2025 issue)
