It is implied in Republic Act No. 7165, the law creating the Literacy Coordinating Council (LCC) in 1991, that at the time, the then Department of Education, Culture, and Sports was satisfactorily fulfilling its function of teaching reading. It is clear in Section 1 that the subject of coverage under the law, which sought to totally eradicate illiteracy, are illiterate people who could not attend school.
By the time the law was amended in 2010, the capacity of the Department of Education (DepEd) to teach reading had unraveled, as seen in the fact that as early as 2006, nonreaders were detected in a public high school in Quezon City.
Even after 80 percent of our students failed to make the minimum reading proficiency level in the Programme for International Student Assessment 2018, and the World Bank reported our country’s 90.9 percent learning poverty rate in 2022, the LCC took advantage of the law’s oversight and brazenly maintained that DepEd’s dismal record in teaching reading was not a cause for concern.
The DepEd’s near total failure in imparting basic literacy has never been raised in LCC proceedings. In fact, it was only in its 2022 annual report that the council made a grudging and glancing reference to the reading crisis in public schools by noting “Increased number of struggling/frustrated readers” among the roadblocks to universal literacy. Note that it even avoided the term “nonreaders,” even when the respondents in the action research “Distance Learning for Learners with Reading Difficulties,” one of the 95 researches listed on the LCC website, were 30 Grades 7 to 10 nonreaders.
Among the most cringeworthy results of the LCC’s shameless refusal to admit that the brunt of the effort to totally eradicate illiteracy had shifted to public elementary and high school classrooms, are the trophies proclaiming local government units as literacy champions during the council’s biennial National Literacy Awards (NLA). This, despite the fact that schools in their jurisdictions are bursting with non-readers.
In the 2024 NLA held Dec. 12, Butuan City copped top honors in the highly urbanized/independent city subcategory of the outstanding local government unit category for the third time in a row. In school year 2021-2022, there were 886 nonreaders and 17,795 frustrated readers in Grades 4 to 10 in public schools in the city (“‘Brigada Pagbasa’ resolves learners’ difficulty in reading,” Philippine Information Agency website, 8/3/23).
Dagupan City is third placer in the subcategory. DepEd-Dagupan City was one of the five school divisions which issued “No Read, No Pass” policies in 2023 and 2024. Issuing a “No Read, No Pass” memorandum is a desperate option of DepEd field offices which are up to their neck with illiteracy in their schools, courtesy of the DepEd mass promotion practice where inability to read is no bar for promotion, even to Grade 12.
The most devastating and ironic impact of the LCC’s coddling of DepEd is the passage of RA 10122 in 2010, which strengthened the LCC’s mandate to universalize literacy. This is like entrusting the management and control of prisons to the prisoners.
Estanislao C. Albano Jr.,
casigayan@yahoo.com