DepEd should take World Bank report as constructive criticism and wake-up call

The World Bank (WB) report that stated that “more than 80 percent of Filipino students do not know what they should know” is a true account of the prevailing and prevalent condition in Philippine public school education.

How could the disastrous results of the Programme for International Student Assessment in 2018, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study in 2019, and the Regional Report of the Southeast Asia Primary Learning Metrics in 2019 be considered very old data (“lumang-luma na datos”) when all these happened just two or three years into Education Secretary Leonor Briones’ watch?

Everything, in fact, got worse after that, with the implementation of the use of DepEd-published modules, many of them error-riddled, and a watered-down curriculum that is based on the Most Essential Learning Competencies, which reduced the former competencies from 14,171 to 5,689, resulting in a reduction of 40.15 percent.

In the first and second quarters of the just-concluded SY 2020-2021, public school students were using modules that contained many errors. One example is the Grade 5 Science module produced by the Schools Division Office of Quezon City, whose merely 18 pages had 187 errors.

Another example is the Grade 10 Filipino module used by public high school students of Mabalacat City, Pampanga, which included a vulgar Filipino word for intercourse in a lesson about the aswang.

Public school students did not have modules to use in both the third and fourth quarters of SY 2020-2021. The DepEd released P1.4 billion for the printing of its own internally developed modules in June 2021, and the modules were delivered to public schools a week before classes ended on July 10, despite the fact that the DepEd knew that those modules would not be used at all.

Last November 2020, the DepEd invited private textbook publishers to produce modules to be used in the third and fourth quarters of SY 2020-2021. Many participated in the exercise and some of them won the right to publish the modules, but to this day, not one module has been printed and delivered. Were the publishers paid for their trouble? How much did the DepEd spend for this monumental exercise in futility which, for all the din and clangor, produced nothing?

Now, the DepEd is in the process of again changing the present curriculum, intending to come up with the “2022 version” by the end of 2021. What will public school students use in Q1 and Q2 of the coming SY 2021-2022—the same error-riddled modules they used in SY 2020-2021?

If they use the modules developed by the DepEd for Q3 and Q4 of SY 2020-2021, they will in effect be using modules that do not conform and are not aligned with the new “2022 version,” which by then would’ve been the curriculum in force.

The DepEd should take the WB report as constructive criticism and a wake-up call. This is how we, a borrower-nation, should respond and react to what our lender and creditor is suggesting that we do: (1) Eat humble pie and apologize to the millions of public school students who, by what the DepEd did wrong or did not do right, have been reduced to being donkeys in a world of horses and are condemned to live sorry lives of unmitigated ignorance and poverty; (2) seriously mend its errant ways, programs, and policies; (3) just do the job for which they were hired and paid to do; and (4) do only what are true, good, and correct.

Antonio Calipjo Go, sickbookstogo@gmail.com