By Estanislao Albano, Jr.
Given the fact that it is very clear that our rock bottom reading literacy is now the Achilles heel of our basic education and the primary cause of our successive fiascos in international assessments, any education reform program that will be adopted rises and falls with the quality of its reading literacy policy and how well this will be implemented. In the said letter, I pointed out that the Sulong EduKalidad is worthless because it targets Grade 3 as the term learners become readers explaining that it is only a reiteration of the old Every Child a Reader Program (ECARP) which to begin with, pushed us into the hole we are now in.
Needless to say, even if strictly applied, Grade 3 is uncompetitive and therefore, untenable target as other countries make their Grade 1 pupils read. Worse than that, obviously, DepEd does not intend to hit the target. Let me explain.
I picked the Sulong EduKalidad reading target information from the introduction of the Philippine Mathematics and Science curriculum in the “TIMSS 2019 Encyclopedia: Education Policy and Curriculum in Mathematics and Science” in the website of the TIMSS and PIRLS International Study Center. Each participant to the 2019 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) was required to submit the profile of their Science and Mathematics education. The target is not in materials on the Sulong EduKalidad in the website of the DepEd or elsewhere and I never heard an official of the agency mention it leading me to suspect that the material was just for the consumption of TIMSS.
My suspicion was bolstered when the DepEd did not bring up the reading target during the Bicol non-reader controversy February of last year which raises the eyebrow as the Sulong EduKalidad was launched on December 3, 2019. That would have been a perfect time for DepEd national officials to hammer into the heads of its people all over the country that under the Sulong EduKalidad, there will be no more non-readers from Grade 4 onwards.
That means that the Sulong EduKalidad which is supposed to make the country close the learning gaps found by the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is no different from the unreformed system in as far as maintaining a deadline for learners to become literate is concerned. There is none. Non-readers are still free to move up the grades wiping out all claims of the DepEd that the Sulong EduKalidad is our path to quality education. In the first place, for education to be quality, it is axiomatic that children read in Grade 1 or even earlier. Now under the Sulong EduKalidad, the child still retains the freedom to chose when he wants to pick up the skill including in high school if that’s what he fancies. Talking about quality education as defined by our current DepEd officials.
All these observations point to the likelihood that DepEd had surreptitiously and unilaterally adopted the social promotion system and intends to maintain it regardless of the catastrophe it has brought upon the country so far.
Social promotion, a practice in some countries, is a system which permits the promotion of school children to the next grade regardless of performance. It is consistent with the practice of the DepEd to allow illiterate learners to move on to the next grade until even high school with the full knowledge of DepEd authorities beginning from the schools all the way to Pasig.
It is high time the DepEd explains why they decided to take the crucial step on their own without consulting with anyone. They should have presented their idea to Congress because now we have a law which mandates quality and globally competitive education on one hand and implementors who say anything goes on the other. Wide public consultations should have been conducted because all Filipinos had a stake in the DepEd decision to implement a de facto social promotion set up considering that the quality of the education of our children determines their future and the future of the country as well. We all know it was not only DepEd who was shamed by our children’s showing in the PISA and TIMSS.
If DepEd denies that they are implementing social promotion, then they should explain how come the Southeast Asia Primary Learning Metrics (SEA-PLM) discovered that 27 percent of our Grade 5 pupils cannot read? How could such a large number of non-readers slip through to Grade 5 without the knowledge and participation of the DepEd itself? How come it was the SEA-PLM and not the DepEd which informed us of the anomaly?**
