ON ERRONEOUS TEXTBOOKS

The author is Teacher

PENELOPE G. CORTEZ

The Department of Education is implementing reviews and reforms to ensure and update the accuracy compliance to learning competencies of materials used in public schools. This came in the heels of old textbooks used in certain public schools in Valenzuela and Bulacan which are not issued by DepEd.

These textbooks are also not aligned with the K to 12 curriculum, hence the inadequate information provided about the Marcos dictatorship.

DepEd is cognizant of the importance of looking into similar materials which may be using marks of the agency, and has already reached out to and invited the most active critics of textbooks to participate in the review process.

Republic Act No. 8047, or the Book Publishing Industry Development Act, confines the Department’s mandate to “preparing the minimum learning competencies, and/or prototypes and other specifications for books and/or manuscripts called for; testing, evaluating, selecting and approving the manuscripts or books to be submitted by the publishers for multiple adoption; providing assistance in the distribution of textbooks to the public school systems; and promulgating with the participation and assistance of the Board rules and regulations for the private book publishers in the call, testing evaluation, selection, approval, as well as production specification and acquisition of public school textbooks.”

Education Secretary Leonor Magtolis Briones noted that the law says that this has to be written and published by private printers. This explains also why new developments, new information, new perspectives, are not reflected immediately in textbooks.

DepEd has also been implementing varying evaluation and quality assurance processes for learning resources and instructional materials developed by private publishers for the agency.

Lastly, DepEd is already conducting review workshops of all its learning materials to help identify and correct errors. The agency is also considering ways on how to ensure that textbooks being used in private schools may also be reviewed by the Department prior to use.

Briones said that part of the DepEd’s efforts to make all these corrections is to look at the schools that are still using these kinds of textbooks, which have lost their relevance. It is a duty on their part, she said, to check on the schools which are still using these books because there are a lot of new materials already.

— oOo—

III at M. Nepomuceno Elementary School