Literacy Coordinating Council rejects DepEd’s literacy data

According to Republic Act No. 7165, as amended by RA 10122, the Literacy Coordinating Council (LCC), the interagency body tasked to coordinate all literacy efforts in the country, is supposed to come up with measures to enable “the monitoring and evaluation of the literacy situation in the country.”

But 14 years since the passage of RA 10122, the LCC has yet to comply with the mandate. The country has the 11th worst learning poverty rate in the world and was last, then 76th of 81 countries in reading in the 2018 and 2022 rounds of the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa), respectively. However, the only literacy data available on the website of the LCC are the results of the Functional Literacy, Education and Mass Media Survey (FLEMMS) which are too good to be true in light of the results of international student assessments.

According to the latest FLEMMS (2019), 96.5 percent of 10-year-old and above Filipinos are basic literate and 91.6 percent of 10- to 64-year-old Filipinos are functional literate.

There’s no reference to learning poverty on the website. Neither is there any report on the literacy performance of our students in the Pisa and in the Southeast Asia Primary Learning Metrics where our Grade 5 learners placed second to the last in reading.

The LCC does not also recognize the results of the Philippine Informal Reading Inventory (Phil-IRI), the reading assessment test, which the Department of Education (DepEd) has administered twice a year since 2004, as relevant in the determination of the country’s literacy situation.

Had the LCC, instead of dismissing the Phil-IRI as irrelevant, treated it as a useful tool in the monitoring and evaluation of the literacy situation, there would have been a good chance that this reading crisis could have been averted. As early as 2006 before the DepEd started hiding Phil-IRI results, the reading test already sounded the alarm on the deteriorating literacy levels in public schools.

Had the LCC demanded from the DepEd the nationwide Phil-IRI results and had included the data in its mandatory annual report to Congress and disseminated the same to the public all in furtherance of its mandate to totally eradicate illiteracy, the DepEd would have been forced to act accordingly on whatever were causing the rapid decline in literacy among our students.

The LCC should explain why it deems the literacy data produced by its lead agency unfit for purposes of proper monitoring and evaluation of the country’s literacy situation.

If the purpose is the formulation of policy recommendations on how to beat rampant illiteracy in public elementary and high schools, the Phil-IRI is still useful. Take the case of the SY 2018-2019 English Phil-IRI pretest data submitted to Sen. Sherwin Gatchalian which placed nonreaders and frustration readers among the 3.6 million Grades 4 to 6 students at 3 percent and 40 percent, respectively. The data can adequately underpin the recommendation that the DepEd strictly implement the grade level reading standards.

ESTANISLAO C. ALBANO JR.,
casigayan@yahoo.com