TABUK CITY, Kalinga – Based on current realities, the “Every Child a Reader by Grade 1” agenda of the Department of Education (DepEd) is a pipe dream and will remain so unless the agency undertakes drastic and sound changes immediately.
Rhoda Lyne Mudlong, principal of the Kidzspace Learning Center (KLC), one of the at least three private elementary schools in the city accommodating public school students with reading difficulties in their summer enrichment classes, informed they have 36 non-readers and slow readers which include two incoming Grade 7 students this summer.
She said that the two Grade 7 students “read like Grade 1 pupils so we are using Grade 1 reading books and are starting from the very beginning” adding that they also had four Grade 7 students last summer.
Evalinda Balawing, principal of the Saint Tonis College elementary department which also opened its doors to reading laggards from public schools in the summer of 2013, said that in 2017, they had two Grade V pupils who could identify letters and sounds but could not read.
The Tabuk City National High School (TCNHS) which started its reading program more than a decade ago to help first year students with reading problems catch up with their classmates had 57 in the reading class last school year.
Master Teacher I Rejie Astodello, program coordinator, informed that the reading comprehension of the enrolees of the special class are equivalent to those of Grades 1 to 4 pupils adding that during his three years in the program, he had encountered one student who could not read at all.
Astodello said that majority of their reading program clients are from the city, some come from other towns of the province and a small number are transferees from other provinces which somehow indicates that the problem is not confined to the locality.
“Mass promotion policy”
Mudlong tags what she terms as mass promotion policy of the DepEd as the main culprit for the high incidence of reading laggards in the public school system in this city and province.
She said that the policy provides that pupils who do not have the reading skills commensurate to their grade are promoted to the next grade on condition that the teacher commits to tutor the child during the summer.
She said that the policy is failing because the classroom population in public schools make it impossible for these schools to effectively address the needs of each reading laggard.
There, however, is a dispute on whether or not there is a DepEd mass promotion policy and it does not help that those who contend it exists could not produce the issuance.
Be that as it may, TNCHS Master Teacher I Giovanni Asbucan blames the abandonment of the old rule that a pupil cannot be promoted to Grade II if he cannot read for the phenomenon claiming that back in the days when the rule was in place, families did their best to help a Grade 1 member learn to read.
Asbucan also alleges that teachers these days are under pressure to pass all students.
“First, when you fail a student, you provide justifications and would be asked by superiors what you have done for the student. Because of the difficulties that teachers have to go through to justify failing students, what usually happens is they pass undeserving students to avoid all the hassles. Second, schools have performance evaluation and among the bases for evaluation are the drop out and failure rate,” Asbucan said.
Asbucan said that because drop out and failure rates are part of the bases for schools performance evaluation, some schools resort to concealing the unpleasant truth about laggards in their reports only to be exposed when the students enrol in high school.
Other factors
Balawing said that many of their enrolees come from public schools in remote barangays of the province and some have absentee parents and other relatives who are unwilling to help them learn to read.
She also pointed to lack of dedication on the part of some public school teachers as another factor. Astodello echoed the observation saying that during his elementary days, teachers never gave up on laggards until they coped.
On the other hand, Mudlong said she does not blame public school teachers not doing their jobs but other factors like IQ of the child should be considered “because no matter how you convey lessons if the mind of the child cannot absorb, it would be futile.” She also mentioned the inability of some children to focus and retain lessons and likewise their short span of attention.
“Do not let teachers do all the work in nurturing the child development. The responsibility of the parents is greater they being the first teachers of the children. Teachers and parents should cooperate,” Mudlong also said.
Astodello said that teachers these days are swamped with activities including the accomplishment of too many paperwork some of which are redundant leaving them almost no time to administer reading interventions.
He commented that in the past, children learned without these deluge of additional activities for teachers.
Suggested solution
Asbucan said that the simple solution to the problem is to put the best teachers in Grades I and II and “treat them like Math and Science teachers who are a salary grade higher than their counterparts in other subjects.”
He said that this is just fair because teaching in the primary grades demands more from the teacher because the class is divided into the slow learners, average learners and fast learners whose lessons are not the same.
“It is as though you have three classes unlike from Grade IV onwards that you have one lesson for the entire class. We still diversify in higher grades but not as much,” Asbucan said.
“If you do not put the best in Grades I and II, how do you expect the best results? At the moment, teaching the two grades is not something you get excited about. The opportunities for advancement are limited in the positions as you are stuck in the classroom and do not have much chance to earn points for promotion,” Asbucan said.
“When you teach Grades I and II, you are supposed to concentrate and are not supposed to be leaving the classroom. You are too busy to get to know higher ups. The solution therefore is to make teaching Grades I and II as a criterion for promotion because they lay down the foundations of the education of children,” Asbucan explained.
Asbucan stressed that Grade I teachers should be trained for reading classes and specially to handle those who have difficulties learning how to read.
DepEd reaction
Maribel Viernes, Kalinga Schools Division Education Program Supervisor for English and Mother Tongue, accepted the possibility that the information of Mudlong that the six non-reader elementary graduates who enrolled in the summer reading classes in KLC were from schools in the Kalinga Schools Division is true saying one reason they were allowed to graduate is the mass promotion policy of the DepEd.
She, however, could not identify the specific issuance during the interview.
As to what happens if all the remedial activities and interventions as required by the alleged policy fail, Viernes said that the child should be assessed for the possibility of transfer to the SPED class or the placement under a tutor.
She said that one intervention teachers in the division make is bring non-readers and slow readers to sit in reading classes of lower grades.
She said they will also conduct a 15-day reading class this summer for frustration level readers in the division.
Viernes said that apart from low IQ, absenteeism, distance of the houses of pupils to the school which tend to cause absenteeism, accessibility of multi-media gadgets which distract attention of children are among the reasons for the incidence of frustration level readers in schools in the province.
Tabuk City Division Chief Education Supervisor Lorraine Tubban told the ZigZag Weekly it is not true that public elementary schools in the city allow the promotion of non-readers because in the first place, in order to advance to the next level, pupils must pass all the subjects which they could not possibly do unless they could read.
She explained that the term non-reader does not literally mean pupils cannot recognize letters and do not know the sounds of letters.
“They could be frustration level readers, meaning their reading skills are not aligned with their mental ages. For example, they could be 10 year old but do not have the reading skills of a 10 year old,” Tubban said.
Tubban denies that the DepEd has a mass promotion policy saying that under the “spiralling” concept in the K-12, pupils cannot advance to the next grade unless they master the required competencies because the next level comes with more complex set of knowledge to be learned and deficiency in the current level will only make it more difficult for the child to catch up.
She said that in cases where teachers have exhausted every means to help a pupil read to no avail, then the child will have to be retained. She accepted though that since in the K-12, drop out and failure rates are measures in assessing the performance of teachers and the overall performance of the school, drop out and failures rates impact on the performance rating of teachers and schools.
Asked if it is fair for teachers to take responsibility for things beyond their control, Tubban said that instances where pupils are the problem and do not help themselves despite the all out efforts of teachers are exemptions.
“Teachers cannot just allow their pupils to drop out. They are held responsible because they are part of the school and everyone is accountable for the performance of the school,” Tubban said.
It was found that in the Individual Performance Commitment and Review (IPCR) form of one school in the city, a teacher in whose class only 92 percent of the pupils complete the school year due to failure and dropping out, gets a “Poor” rating in the objective.
Regarding the problem of there being more slow learners in the class than the teacher could handle, Tubban said it all goes back to the commitment of the teacher explaining that a committed teacher would seek the assistance of other teachers to get the job done.
Tubban said that teachers should not use the paperwork attendant to their work as an excuse for their inability to perform their sworn duty to help the child learn to read because in the first place, paperwork is part of the job of teachers.
The debate goes on but the fact remains that after all the changes instituted by the DepEd including the adoption of the K-12 curriculum, we have Grade 7 students needing to undergo a crash course in order to learn to properly read, a shocking reality that may not have been there before the agency started experimenting with the curriculum. **By Estanislao Albano, Jr.
