Gwen, Local School Board’s next agenda: ‘Mass promotion policy’

Governor Gwendolyn Garcia said on Tuesday, December 17, that schools in Cebu province will revert to English as the main medium of instruction starting School Year 2020-2021. (Rosalie Abatayo)

CEBU CITY, Philippines — The “unofficial mass promotion policy” of the Department of Education will be the next agenda for the Local School Board (LSB) in Cebu province.

Governor Gwendolyn Garcia vowed that the LSB would review the “unofficial” policy which she referred to as a form of mediocrity and “not what Cebu deserves.”

Although there is no official order from the Department of Education that directs teachers not to flunk underperforming students, having students repeat grade level has been reportedly discouraged for years now.

“We should institute a standard of excellence here. Total, kung dili kaya sa utok, basin kaya sa pangamot,” said Garcia.

(If a child is not academically inclined, he could do well on tools and handiworks.)

“Nganong ato mang ingnon nga no student left behind maski na og di gyud makatungtong bisan man lang og 75 [percent]? That’s mediocrity. That’s a disservice to this province,” she added.

(Why do we say that no student gets left behind even if the child is unable to attain even the passing grade of 75?)

Read more: Gwen wants English back as main medium of instruction in public schools

Last Tuesday, December 17, Garcia also announced that all public elementary and high schools in Cebu province should revert back to English as the main medium of instruction.

Garcia said the current setup where subjects from pre-school to grade three were taught in Cebuano would confuse the students especially when it would concern competencies in reading comprehension, mathematics, and sciences.

The LSB, in their meeting last Friday, December 13, passed a resolution directing all schools to teach in English again starting next school year or on June 2020.

But DepEd Central Visayas OIC Regional Director Salustiano Jimenez said the power to change the curriculum, even the medium of instruction, would lie with the Congress, the DepEd and not the LSB.

Jimenez said the guidelines in carrying out the education system in the country had already been laid out in the Enhanced Basic Education Act of 2013 or Republic Act 10533 , which also defined the K-12 curriculum.

Jimenez said he could forward the LSB resolution to the DepEd Central Office for Secretary Leonor Briones to consider it.

RA 10533 says that: “The curriculum shall adhere to the principles and framework of Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE) which starts from where the learners are and from what they already knew proceeding from the known to the unknown; instructional materials and capable teachers to implement the MTB-MLE curriculum shall be available.”/dbs