‘Catch-up Fridays’ will fail if DepEd does not stop mass promoting nonreaders

With the entire morning of Fridays devoted to reading intervention and enhancement activities and the rest of day for values, health, and peace education, the primary thrust of the “Catch-up Fridays” learning intervention program of the Department of Education (DepEd) is to remedy “the low proficiency levels in reading based on national and international large-scale assessments.”However, the program does not address the root cause of the problem which is the nonenforcement of the reading literacy standards of the K-12 curriculum. It is conspicuous that in all its statements and the guidelines issued on the program, DepEd did not commit to applying the standards. Neither is there any reference to whether to retain or pass learners who fail to learn to read after undergoing the program for a school year giving rise to the possibility that students could undergo the program for years yet remain illiterate.

This is concerning because the precise reason reading incompetence has bogged down our basic education is, instead of enforcing the reading literacy standards of the curriculum, the DepEd is passing nonreaders and frustration-level readers to the next grade all the way to senior high school. The most recent solid evidence that DepEd is mass-promoting reading laggards is the result of the 2022 Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) wherein 76 percent of our students fell below Level 2 in reading proficiency.

According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the body behind Pisa, Level 2 is the point when “students begin to demonstrate the capacity to use their reading skills to acquire knowledge and solve a wide range of practical problems.” In other words, those who fall short of Level 2 could not comprehend, much less put to use, what they are reading.

Our Pisa takers would have coped with Level 2 were DepEd implementing the K-12 curriculum reading literacy standards because, as of Grade 6, Filipino students already cross the Level 2 threshold. The Grade 6 grade level standards in the English subject states: “[C]ommunicates feelings and ideas orally and in writing with high level of proficiency; and reads various text type materials to serve learning needs in meeting a wide range of life’s purposes” (English Curriculum Guide, page 125). Filipino 15-year-olds are in high school.

In fact, the Grade 4 grade level standards state that the learner “reads independently and gets relevant information from various text types” (English Curriculum Guide, page 86).

If the DepEd continues to defy the reading standards of the curriculum, the “Catch-up Fridays” will fail just like the “Every Child a Reader Program” (ECARP) and the “Bawat Bata Bumabasa,” its two earlier national reading programs.

Launched in 2001, the ECARP is a “national program that [supports] the thrust of the Department of Education to make every child a reader [and writer] at his/her grade level.” On the other hand, rolled out in 2019 to address assessment results barring deficient reading skills among elementary and high school students, the “Bawat Bata Bumabasa” is supposed to “strengthen the reading proficiency of every learner.”

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Ironically, however, it was during the implementation of the ECARP and the “Bawat Bata Bumabasa” that the unprecedented reading and education crises hit the country. That’s because even with the country landing at the bottom of the reading literacy rankings in international student assessments, racking up 69.5 percent learning poverty incidence before the COVID-19 pandemic and having an expanding nonreader population in high school, the DepEd still refuses to accept the fact that when Filipino students are aware that they could be promoted even if they could not read, they would take the learning of the fundamental learning skill for granted.

Thus in the context of “Catch-up Fridays,” the question is how our students could play catch-up to the rest of the world in reading proficiency when the DepEd refuses to enforce the curriculum’s reading literacy standards, which to begin with are already weaker than the standards of other countries.

Estanislao C. Albano, Jr.,casigayan@yahoo.com