‘Old,’ ‘up to date’: Inventing word meanings and data on the education crisis

Whenever the Department of Education (DepEd) is under fire, Secretary Leonor Briones resorts to fallacious reasoning, mental gymnastics, and even changing word meanings. Take the case of the word “old” or “luma” in her written press release and pre-recorded television statement when she demanded an apology from the World Bank (WB) for the latter’s report on the education crisis in the country. In the televised statement, she described the results of the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa), 2019 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, and 2019 Southeast Asia Primary Learning Metrics as already luma because they have already been published, discussed publicly, and are already known to members of Congress and to critics.

Following the unilateral definition of Briones, the 2018 National Achievement Test (NAT) results, which are still being withheld by the DepEd for reasons of its own although already available in May 2019, will still be new, say, five years from now, if that’s the time the agency chooses to finally release it for public consumption regardless of the fact that the assessment was conducted the same year as Pisa.

Going by the accepted definition of the word luma, the data of the three assessments are still new because Pisa was only in 2018 and the other two were in 2019, with the next cycles of all three assessment surveys still in the future.

This is not the first time Briones has invented a word meaning. In her attempt to discredit the news report regarding the alleged 70,000 nonreaders in Bicol the other February, she described a nonreader as follows: “Not knowing how to read is different from being illiterate,” and “do not know how to read” did not mean no read, no write. By uttering such nonsense, Briones earned the distinction of being the only education secretary in the world who does not know what a nonreader is. It also proves that she does not know that the Philippine Informal Reading Inventory (Phil-IRI), the DepEd’s reading assessment tool, has a definition of the word “nonreader,” which is as follows: “Nonreaders are pupils who are unable: to recognize and sound out letter-sound connections for single consonants; to recognize and sound out letter-sound connections for some consonant blends; to blend consonants and vowels in simple one-word (cvc, ccvc, cvcc) patterns; and to distinguish among long and short vowels that follow rules.”

Back to the issue of the WB report, in the DepEd press statement calling for an apology from the bank, Briones claimed that the report omitted the “up to date” data. During the Bicol nonreader controversy, Briones said they cannot release the nationwide results of the Phil-IRI because the Phil-IRI is not a standardized tool. With that, the only standardized tests administered by the DepEd after the 2018 Pisa were the 2018 NAT and the Basic Education Exit Assessment (BEEA), the test for graduating senior high school students, for 2018 and 2019. The overall average mean percentage score (MPS) for Grade 6 NAT was 37.44, the lowest ever in the history of the NAT, while that of Grade 10 was 44.59, the third lowest ever. These mean that the Grade 6 takers averaged less than four correct answers for every 10 questions, while the Grade 10 examinees got over four correct answers for every 10 questions. On the other hand, the pioneer Grade 12 graduates (2018) obtained an average MPS of 36.71, while that of the 2019 batch obtained 36.45. If these are the “up to date” data Briones is referring to, then they are not an improvement on the performance of our students in the three international assessments.

Based on the BEEA score in SY 2018–2019, it can be said that the situation as described by the WB report did not improve in SY 2018–2019, and we all know the learning conditions in SY 2020–2021 were abnormal due to the pandemic. So if Briones insists that the situation described in the WB report no longer exists as our children are performing better according to the data, then she invents not only word meanings, but also data.

Estanislao C. Albano Jr.,[email protected]