Department of Education, not teachers, key factor in Philippines’ learning poverty

In its report “Fixing the Foundation: Teachers and Basic Education in East Asia and Pacific,” the World Bank (WB) tagged deficient teaching skills as the primary factor for the country’s 91 percent learning poverty. This is a gross error that lets the real culprit off the hook: the Department of Education (DepEd).

The WB calculated the country’s learning poverty rate from the reading results of the 2019 Southeast Asia Primary Learning Metrics (SEA-PLM), a test our Grade 5 pupils took in English. The norm is for countries to teach their schoolchildren to read in their primary medium of instruction and thus, their local and international test language in Grade 1. Some academically leading countries like Singapore and Estonia do it even earlier.

But in the case of the Philippines, not even the best teachers in reading can teach public school students to read in English in Grade 1 because that would be a violation of the curriculum. Under the K-12 curriculum, English reading competency is only introduced in the second semester of Grade 2 (The Philippine Informal Reading Inventory Manual 2018, page 1). That means the students whose reading skills served as basis for the country’s learning poverty rate were reading in a language they had used for only two years at most, although they were already in Grade 5.

According to the results of the SEA-PLM, 27 percent of our Grade 5 students could not read based on the SEA-PLM reading literacy definition. They were “still at the stage of matching single words to an image of a familiar object or concept” and “have not yet developed the essential foundational skills that are the building blocks of becoming a proficient reader.” The SEA-PLM defines reading literacy as “understanding, using, and responding to a range of written texts, in order to meet personal, societal, economic, and civic needs.” (“SEA-PLM 2019 Main Regional Report,” pages 41-44).

How come those reading laggards were in Grade 5 when the K-12 curriculum provides that at the end of Grade 3, a learner should be a fluent reader in English, while DepEd Order No. 45, series of 2002, which remains in effect, states that no child should be promoted to Grade 4 if he or she could not competently read?

Blame it not on the teachers, but on the DepEd practice of promoting to the next grade the ineligible, including illiterates, using mass promotion (“EdCom II should probe, stop rampant mass promotion immediately,” Letters, 9/21/23). In 1995, before the advent of mass promotion, the elementary assessment test showed that 59 percent of Grade 6 pupils mastered reading and writing (“Report: Philippine Country EFA Assessment”). On the other hand, the 2019 SEA-PLM found that only 10 percent of our Grade 5 pupils were reading at a level “generally expected of children at the end of primary education.”

The fact that private schools have no problem with reading literacy when their teachers are less trained and less qualified than their public school counterparts also debunks the WB finding. With higher pay and better benefits in public schools, the trend is for private school teachers to migrate to public schools. Likewise, public schools have more qualified teaching personnel because the DepEd does not hire unlicensed teachers, while some private schools resort to hiring unlicensed teachers due to economic constraints.

Given these circumstances, if deficient teaching skills were the main factor for learning poverty, then the reading literacy situation in private schools should be worse than in public schools. On the contrary, private schools practically have no nonreaders starting from Grade 2, while public schools mass produce elementary graduates who cannot read. The DepEd has admitted that private schools are unaffected by the reading crisis gripping public schools. But it only addressed the “Hamon: Bawat Bata Bumabasa” memorandum, its response to the reading crisis which it issued in 2019, to public schools (DepEd Memorandum No. 173, series of 2019). How come? Because private schools make their pupils read in Grade 1 and do not practice mass promotion?

Estanislao C. Albano Jr.

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