By Estanislao Albano, Jr.
One of the perverse excuses public elementary school teachers and principals offer when confronted with their practice of passing non-readers is the absence of a separate reading subject in the K to 12 Curriculum where they could give reading laggards a failing grade. They are trying to say that in DepEd Order No. 8, series of 2015, the classroom assessment policy guidelines of the Department of Education (DepEd), learners could get passing grades in all subjects from Grade 1 to Grade 12 even if they cannot read.
At any rate, with the advent of the Matatag Curriculum, these mass promotion agents must now invent a new excuse as the curriculum has a Reading and Literacy subject in Grade 1. The curriculum is clear that at the end of Grade 1, a pupil should be able to read because the fourth quarter performance standard is as follows: “The learners automatically recognize sight words, decode words, express ideas; read sentences with appropriate speed, accuracy, and expression; and narrate personal experiences with one’s environment and content-specific topics.”
Thus, if the DepEd opts to promote Grade 1 non-readers to Grade 2 like it had been doing since SY 2002-2003 and the rest of the government and Philippine society will put up with the enormity, we will earn the notorious distinction of being the first country in the world where, irony of ironies, Grade 1 pupils could hurdle the Reading and Literacy subject even if they could not read.
The absurdity which is worthy of Guinness Book of World Records is not farfetched because, thanks to the DepEd’s mass promotion practice, we have students who pass the Math subject nine times but are still unable to add. DepEd Undersecretary Gina Gonong admitted to the Second Congressional Commission on Education (EdCom II) last August that there are Grades 7-10 students who could not add. The K to 12 Curriculum has a Math subject in Grades 1-10.
To deflect this yet new blackeye on the entire nation courtesy of the DepEd, it is incumbent on concerned government bodies particularly the basic education committees of both chambers of Congress, the EdCom II, the Literacy Coordinating Council and even Malacanang to immediately do the following:
First, sans participation from the DepEd, investigate if all the Grade 1 pupils in Matatag Curriculum pilot schools in SY 2023-2024 learned to read and if not, check if those who failed to do so were promoted to Grade 2 or not.
Second, in the event that there were non-readers among the Matatag Curriculum pilot Grade 1 pupils who were promoted, compel the DepEd to issue a policy explicitly stating that Grade 1 pupils who cannot read even after the summer remedial will be failed in Reading and Literacy and be retained in Grade 1.
It should be included in the policy that the validation of the literacy status of Grade1 pupils will be done by an independent body with the number of non-readers from each school reported to the public. These measures are necessary because DepEd is notoriously dishonest and opaque. Non-readers in high school were first detected in 2006, the media started reporting about them in 2018 but it was only last August the national leadership of the agency admitted there are non-readers in Grades 7-10. DepEd has been conducting the Philippine Informal Reading Inventory reading assessment twice a year since 2004 but the only nationwide literacy situationers we have are the results of the Programme for International Student Assessment and the Southeast Asia Primary Learning Metrics and the learning poverty report of the World Bank.
Third, inform teachers and principals and likewise their superiors all the way up to the regional directors that allowing non-readers to pass the Reading and Literacy subject could imperil their careers and even their freedom. Obviously, certifying that a Grade 1 non-reader had earned a final descriptive rating of “Fairly Satisfactory,” “Satisfactory,” “Very Satisfactory” or “Outstanding” in the Report on Promotion and Learning Program Achievement specially so that there is now a Reading and Literacy subject is a clear case of falsification and dishonesty.**
