By Estanislao Albano, Jr.
We strongly condemn the attempt of some advocates of the Mother Tongue-based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE) to shift the blame for the failure of the said policy onto teachers and the teacher-training institutions they come from. It is baseless, unjust and juvenile.
During the forum on the MTB-MLE organized by the Department of Education (DepEd) and the USAID on February 22, 2021, retired University of Philippines linguistics professor Ricardo Ma. Nolasco — citing the results of Functional Literacy, Education and Mass Media Survey (FLEMMS) in 2003 and 2019 where the incidences of elementary school graduates who could understand what they read were 46 percent and 52.4 percent, respectively, and studies he did not specify — boldly concluded that the most important reason our education programs fail is “Teacher Factor,” explaining it’s not the fault of the teachers themselves but primarily of the deficient preparation they obtained from the teacher-education institutions they graduated from.
How Nolasco could possibly say that when the evidence points to the bankruptcy of the MTB-MLE policy compounded by the patent blunders of the DepEd in its execution and implementation, as well as long-standing counterproductive policies of the agency as the culprits in the failure of the language policy, indicates his and his cohorts’ desperation to save the MTB-MLE at all cost, even at the expense of truth and fairness, which is very harmful to the education of our grades school children.
In the case of the explosion of non-readers during the implementation of the MTB-MLE — as confirmed by the finding in the Southeast Asia Primary Learning Metrics (SEA-PLM) that 27 percent of our Grade 5 pupils could not read — how can teachers and their colleges be held responsible for the failure of the language policy to deliver on its promise for quicker learning of reading when the disaster is just the continuing consequence, and aggravation thereof, of the DepEd’s decision in 2001 to stop enforcing any reading cut-off point, practically unleashing illiteracy on our basic education?
Here’s the proof that our non-reader woes emanated from that decision of the DepEd: a DepEd data document — cited in the “The Philippines country case study” by Rhona B. Caoli-Rodriguez 2007, published in the UNESCO Digital Library — states that the nationwide non-reader incidence in 2005 and 2006 were 1.74 percent and 2.56 percent, respectively. Considering the difference between the rates of the two years and working back, it is safe to assume that when the DepEd decided to get rid of the “No Read, No Move” Policy, which kept Grade 2 onwards free of illiteracy, in 2001, the non-reader incidence was negligible or even nil.
Now, how could Nolasco absolve the DepEd from any fault over the mass production of non-readers when, based on the 27 percent non-reader incidence for Grade 5 detected in the SEA-PLM, it can be clearly seen that a quarter of the population of the elementary pupils from Grades 4 to 6 cannot read? The Every Child a Reader Program (ECARP) prohibits the promotion of learners who do not manifest mastery of basic literacy to Grade 4. How could the DepEd not know what’s going on when the incidence translates to millions of students; and furthermore, the agency annually conducts the Philippine Informal Reading Inventory (Phil-IRI) reading test? To exonerate the DepEd from blame of the present reading crisis, therefore, is to picture the agency as inept, irresponsible, and even stupid as the epidemic of illiteracy rampantly spreads in our schools unchecked under its very nose. We, therefore, await the reaction of the DepEd to Nolasco’s “Teacher Factor” explanation for the unraveling of the MTB-MLE.
Before Nolasco and company decided to hide the utter failure of the MTB-MLE in reading literacy behind “Teacher Factor,” they also did not consider the following facts: teachers in private and public schools come from the same colleges; with the higher pay and better benefits in public schools, the trend is for private school teachers to migrate to public schools; and public schools have more qualified teaching personnel, because it is a common practice private schools to hire unlicensed teachers due to economic constraints. Given these circumstance and if “Teacher Factor” is to blame for the failure of the MTB-MLE to deliver on its promise for quicker reading, how come private schools have practically no non-readers in Grade 2 while as many as a quarter of the graduates of public elementary schools could not read?
Regarding the specific promise of quicker learning of reading in the second and third languages, even if the DepEd has the best reading teachers in the world, they cannot make Grade 1 pupils read in English which happens to be our main medium of instruction and local and international test language because the MTB-MLE Curriculum only introduces English beginning reading in the second semester of Grade 2 (Revised Phil-IRI Manual, Page 1).
From the foregoing, it is clear that the DepEd and the MTB-MLE — not the teachers and their respective training institutions — were responsible for the country’s humiliation in the 2019 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) where we landed at the bottom. Based on the findings of the SEA-PLM that 27 percent of our Grade 5 pupils could not read, around the same percentage or even more of our Grade 4 pupils who took the TIMSS could not read also. In addition, because of the MTB-MLE Curriculum’s timetable of teaching reading in English, our takers were reading in our test language in only one and half years at most as compared to the three years the examinees from other countries were already reading in their test languages. **To be continued
