The Mother Tongue policy

The claim of Andrew Masigan in “Our education crisis: Why and what next?” (Oct. 13, 2021) that “the Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE) has proven to be the most effective teaching method for those whose first language is neither Filipino or English” is baseless.

For his information, the overall mean percentage score (MPS) of the Cordillera Administrative Region (CAR), Regions 2 and 7 all of whose first language is neither Filipino or English decreased in the 2018 National Achievement Test (NAT) when the pioneers of the MTB-MLE took the Grade 6 NAT.

The CAR lost 5.47 (from 45.39 to 39.92) or 12.05 percent, Region 2 shed 2.98 (from 39.99 to 37.01) or 7.47 percent and the overall MPS of Region 7 went down by 3.76 (from 40.30 to 36.54) or by 8.38 percent. (I could only cite the data for the three regions because while the results of the 2018 NAT were available in May 2019, DepEd refuses to release the information until now.)

The overall national Grade 6 MPS for 2018 declined by 2.51 (from 39.95 to 37.44) or by 6.28 percent in 2018, disproving the claim contained in the DepEd Order No. 74, series of 2009, that the policy will lead to improvement in overall academic performance.

If the recommendation of Masigan to enhance and give more funding to the MTB-MLE is heeded, then that would mean the extension of a total failure because after nine years of implementation, the language policy has not delivered on its three other alleged benefits listed in the afore-cited issuance. In fact, the situations in all the areas where the impact of the policy was supposed to be felt only worsened since 2012.

The MTB-MLE is supposed to facilitate the acquisition of new languages but the national Grade 6 English MPS in 2018 fell by 5.71 points or 14.14 percent, which was unprecedented because the biggest decrease from the previous year’s score was the 5.26 points or 8.89 percent in 2006. This made English the biggest loser among the five subjects in Grade 6 NAT in 2018, which is a reversal because in the previous year when the last batch of the old language policy took the test, the English MPS increased by 0.57.

As for the promise of the MTB-MLE to quicken the learning of reading, on the contrary, in no time in the history of our mass education did our schools produce more non-readers than during its implementation. The 2019 Southeast Asia Primary Learning Metrics found that 27 percent of the Filipino Grade 5 pupils could not read.

Compare that to the nationwide non-reader incidence in 2005 and 2006 of 1.74 percent and 2.56 percent, respectively, based on DepEd data cited in the document “The Philippines country case study” (Rhona B. Caoli-Rodriguez, 2007, UNESDOC Digital Library).

It is also very revealing that it was only in November 2019 the DepEd broke its silence on the reading crisis when it launched the “Hamon: Bawat Bata Bumabasa” initiative through Memorandum No. 173, series of 2019, indicating when taking action on the problem became absolutely necessary. – Estanislao C. Albano Jr. [email protected]