DepEd receives bonuses despite failing to improve reading skills
According to a memorandum circular of Administrative Order No. 25 Inter-Agency Task Force (IATF), the body implementing the Performance-Based Incentive System (PBIS) for government employees established under Executive Order No. 80 in 2012, the foremost purpose of performance-based bonus (PBB) is to “recognize and reward exemplary performance in the public sector to enhance service delivery by the bureaucracy.”
But in a swindle that dwarfs the pork barrel scam many times over, the Department of Education (DepEd) is getting rewarded with billions in PBB annually when it is fumbling its most basic function of teaching reading skills. For instance, the agency received P11.6 billion PBB in 2021, the same year the World Bank reported that the country’s learning poverty rate or the number of 10-year-olds who cannot read and understand simple texts hit 90 percent from 69.5 percent in 2019.
This means the DepEd manpower is incompetent in teaching reading because most of our 10-year-olds are in Grade 5 and the rest in Grade 4. Under the grade level reading standards of the K-12 curriculum, at the end of Grade 3, learners should be reading in English with comprehension and by Grade 4, reading independently in the language.
The DepEd also collected PBB in 2018 even though our students ranked last in reading in the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa). Eighty percent of the students fell below Level 2, the minimum level in the reading proficiency scale in the test. This is another proof of the abysmal ineptness of the DepEd as Level 2 is comparable in the K-12 curriculum to Grade 6 level English reading standard. Filipino Pisa takers are high school students.
In 2019, when our Grade 5 students placed second to last in reading in the Southeast Asia Primary Learning Metrics survey, where 27 percent of them were found to be practically illiterate, DepEd officials and employees also got their PBB.
For purposes of the 2023 PBB, let me point out to the AO 25 IATF that not only is the DepEd fleecing taxpayers through the undeserved bonus due to its pathetic failure to teach schoolchildren a fundamental skill, the agency is also forcing the government to unnecessarily spend more to get the job done.
One of the components of the National Learning Camp (NLC), a program “aimed at addressing learning loss” launched in 2023, is an intervention activity for non-readers and non-numerates. The NLC cost the government P1.8 billion in 2024.
Also in 2023, the Department of Social Welfare and Development came up with the “Tara, Basa Tutoring Program” to address literacy issues by hiring financially challenged college students to help Grade 1 struggling readers or incoming Grade 2 non-readers become literate.
On the other hand, the ARAL Program, which was established under the Academic Recovery and Accessible Learning Program Act enacted last year, will hire teachers, para-teachers, and pre-service teachers to enhance literacy and numeracy competencies for Grades 1 to 10.
Why should an agency that pathetically fails to deliver on its most basic task, betraying its mandate and the intended beneficiaries and bloating the budget for its performance deserve the PBB? The AO 25 task force should consider that for generations before the DepEd era, the education arm of the government was able to make all learners read in Grade 1 as well as impart other competencies per the curriculum timetable without outside help.
Estanislao C. Albano Jr.,
casigayan@yahoo.com
