The Literacy Coordinating Council should explain failure to fulfill mandate
Republic Act No. 7165, which created in 1991 the Literacy Coordinating Council (LCC), the interagency body tasked to coordinate all literacy efforts in the country, provided that the council should “submit to Congress an annual report which shall include, among other things, policy recommendations which require legislative action toward the total eradication of illiteracy.” The provision was retained in RA 10122, which amended the law in 2010.
For reasons it only knows, the LCC has been sitting on the directive for 33 years now. It has been devoting almost all of its efforts and resources to the development of functional literacy to the gross neglect of its true mandate.
In fairness, the LCC Blueprint for Action, which was unveiled in 1997 and remains in effect, reveals that on the basis of the then “very high basic literacy rate of almost 94 percent,” the council had broadened the definition of literacy to include functional literacy in its implementation of the law. However, the document noted that: “This does not mean we will not address the needs of some two million Filipinos, mostly members of cultural communities, who still can neither read nor write.”
“Concrete action on the basic literacy campaign is envisioned to be sustained through the initiatory and coordinative effort of the Literacy Coordinating Council,” it added.
The LCC did the very opposite. It stood by as the number of illiterates in the country which stood at two million in 1997 per the LCC Blueprint for Action had tripled to six million by 2019 (2019 Functional Literacy, Education and Mass Media Survey).
Aside from laying bare the inadequacy and futility of all LCC’s endeavors on basic literacy since 1997, the exponential growth of the country’s illiterate population since then has overthrown the rationale of the LCC’s decision to include functional literacy in its implementation of RA 7165.
In a telling evidence of the LCC’s audacious reading of its desired mandate, of the 19 literacy programs which it previously recognized through its National Literacy Awards (NLA) program introduced in the “Best Practices in Literacy” module on the LCC website, nine are totally devoid of basic literacy development components, while four deal with the concern glancingly.
The newly added Gawad Matatag category in the NLA recognizes schools for their efforts in the improvement of learning outcomes in the implementation of the Department of Education’s (DepEd) learning intervention programs and in “financial literacy, health, values and peace education.” The award has no basis in the law whatsoever.
Worst, despite the overwhelming evidence, including the recent admission of Undersecretary Gina Gonong, the permanent DepEd representative to the LCC, that there are non-readers in Grades 7 to 10, the LCC is still in denial about the raging reading crisis in public schools. It has yet to offer a single proposal for ending the reading crisis.
It has a lot of explaining to do as to why it has yet to act on the order for it to submit to Congress policy recommendations aimed at the total eradication of illiteracy after three decades.
Estanislao C. Albano Jr.,
casigayan@yahoo.com
