The Isang Kaibigan book controversy is the story of design, production, procurement, and distribution of learning materials — both textbooks and supplemental reading — in public schools under the Department of Education.
Restrictive procurement, inadequate funding, poor education planning, and flawed evaluation system create the perfect conditions for the production of low quality learning materials being used in public schools. These poorly crafted materials may have contributed to the country’s dismal performance in internal (NAT, ELLN, PhilIRI) and external large scale assessments such as PISA and SEAPLM. By how much? It remains to be determined.
Procurement for learning materials, as with procurement with any goods and services with public funds, goes through layers of qualifications and budget ceiling, the latter a prescription of the National Printing Office. To make the long story short: We buy from the lowest bidder most of the time due to inadequate funding.
Meanwhile, poor education planning should not be blamed solely on DepEd alone because doing so would unnecessarily excuse the two education bodies — the Commission on Higher Education and the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority — from being held accountable for their own shortcomings. The First Congressional Commission on Education, first convened in 1991 under the leadership of the late Senator Edgardo Angara, the father of the new DepEd Secretary Juan Edgardo Angara, authored the trifocalization of our education system, giving birth to CHED and TESDA, and keeping the then-Department of Education, Culture and Sports.
While trifocalization may have been infused with a healthy doze of decentralization, its operationalization remains top-down heavy, unmistakably sustaining centralist planning. The three bodies have grown so large and disjointed that they are now saddled with their respective “internal” problems. Our learning ecosystem has large missing parts. For one, it is unclear how much influence and what clear roles the Department of Science and Technology, the Department of Agriculture, and the Department of Trade and Industry, to name a few, have on education planning beyond the usual three- and six-year cycles.
Before diverging further, Isang Kaibigan is a supplemental reading material with telltale signs that it skipped credible evaluation. While the author can claim the noblest of intentions, the content of the book belies any. If the book is intended for early grades (K-3), it should have been written in Philippine languages to aid at-risk learners who are left behind due to inaccessible medium of instruction, among other reasons. In many parts of Central Visayas, as well as in the Cordilleras and Mindanao, Filipino/Tagalog is a strange language to learners, especially those in K-3. As if by design, this book comes at an inauspicious time as Congress has decided, against science and logic, and in violation of language rights, that at-risk learners are not disadvantaged enough to receive lessons taught in English and Filipino in the early grades.
Senate Bill 2457, authored by Senator Sherwin Gatchalian and approved by the Senate on third reading with a vote of 22-0, seeks to remove the mother language provisions in Sections 4 of Republic Act 10533, thereby reverting to the old, dysfunctional bilingual program. Not to be taken lightly, too, is a spread in the book with high text density, which makes decoding for K-2 learners difficult, if not downright impossible.
Technical flaws aside, Isang Kaibigan is an ill-advised project with little to no serious thought involved, unless the goal for production is social media attention and comic success, of which it is now reaping. The book reminds us of the Vice President’s unremarkable stint as secretary of the DepEd where she could have used her hidden book writing talent to inspire everyone in the department to produce the desired learning outcomes. But then again, it would be asking too much from someone with too little understanding of how basic education works.
It makes sense for Congress then to realign the budget for distribution. While P10 million is minuscule compared to the amount that legislators are given access to in aid of their function, realignment sends the right message — from the wrong messenger, many would counter — that we are not willing financiers of ill-thought out projects in aid of national embarrassment. – Rappler.com
* Data from language mapping and proficiency testing (LMPT) in Central Visayas involving 100 schools and 1,980 K and G3 learners, July-September 2023.