FATE IN THE HANDS OF THOSE WHO UPHOLD

By Jerwyn Villanueva Labagnoy
02-16-2015

On Tuesday last week, the second (and official?) leg of the Rizal district reading evaluation conducted by some of our school administrators left us, the Rizal Central School, with five (5) Non-readers and a good number of Poor readers currently scrambling to have themselves be included in the roster of names to wear togas soon. The program posed as an indication of somewhat pro-active approach to education by the district in a way that could pull our young learners away from ignorance and its ultimate effect to personal economics. On the outset, it appeared to have taken the road to redemption after failing to conduct an essential preparatory evaluation in the beginning of the school year hence the immediate idea to come up with instant results is needed.

I personally can see two categorical issues with this: One is the timing of the program and the other is the result.

As a teacher who had had a reading short-course and a few years ago had taken a reading evaluation training, I learned that timing for an actual evaluation is essentially the bread and butter for a successful reading program. As per the same classroom procedure, reading should first be evaluated during the start of the school year, preferably at the first two months. It is like conducting an actual scholastic pre-test with the goal of understanding the current state and capacity of the learners. There, the pertinent results are gathered and should underwent some profiling to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the readers thereby formulating the necessary individualized program to be schemed in the next six months.

Coming out from the individualized program should be an improved version of a reader like a 4.4 Kitkat upgraded from 2.3 Gingerbread (That's tech-speak for Android devices you probably carry inside your pockets right now). The discrepancy may not be too obvious but the actual difference under the hood could really be enormous. Here, six months of actual reading program can really spell the difference between life and death. Even the popular Kumon which utilizes standardized procedure takes time to make an appeal. How much more in our public school system? The results can then be extracted by applying the post reading evaluation to gauge the development the reader has scaled, comparing each and coming up with a detailed account of improvements. This post evaluation is supposed to be a couple of months before the school year ends.

Equally, from those two observations, I saw two loopholes: First is the failure to hold a properly-timed preparatory evaluation at the beginning of the school year. Second is the veracity of the results when failing to conduct the first criteria.

These two were never put into consideration in our recent reading evaluation. In our case at the Rizal Central School, the pre-evaluation was conducted first in February 2 by each classroom adviser and the post-evaluation immediately the next day by some school administrators. It was too bad to have it immediately cut short when the administrators were summoned by the district supervisor Plerida Payawal on the thick of the evaluation for reasons only them and a few others actually know. It was eventually resumed exactly a week after on February 10.

Questions now linger as to the conclusion of everything that has taken place since the actual evaluation date. With only a couple weeks left before we reach the penultimate and final stretch of March 2015, what fate lies ahead of our five Non-readers and a good number of Poor readers who were deprived of a chance to experience a realistic reading program? Will they be given a chance to march for graduation or not is a straight question that only the people behind the recent reading evaluation as well as those who have prior know-how of the event can uncompromisingly answer.