Reading incomprehension

Carles reads better than Iloilo City. So does Ajuy. So does Barotac Viejo.

The EDCOM 2 numbers put the city at 17.64% of assessed learners struggling to read — worse than San Dionisio at 16.48%, worse than Carles at 10.04%, worse than every town on the province’s top-20 list. That figure translates to 2,964 children, more than the next five local government units combined. And it cannot be blamed on distance or a bad road. Iloilo City has the most teachers in the province, the most schools, the largest education budget, and the universities that train teachers for the whole of Western Visayas. Whatever is failing here, it is not the absence of resources.

The north tells a different story, and it is not really about schools either. San Dionisio, San Rafael, Lemery, Estancia, Sara, Balasan, Batad, Barotac Viejo, Carles, and Ajuy: ten of the province’s worst twenty, forming one unbroken coastline. The same stretch Yolanda flattened in November 2013. Whether that storm is showing up in these scores depends entirely on which grade levels EDCOM 2 assessed, and the commission did not say. Somebody should ask.

What EDCOM 2 did say is that 15 Iloilo LGUs carry a dual burden: struggling readers and stunted children, same municipalities. Western Visayas stunting stood at 27.30% in the 2023 National Nutrition Survey. Karol Mark Yee was blunt about what that means. The damage to brain development is largely irreversible. Which is an awkward thing to hear at an education summit, because it means part of every reading intervention we fund arrives years too late.

The frustrating part is that the tools already exist.

Republic Act No. 11148, the Kalusugan at Nutrisyon ng Mag-Nanay Act, has covered the first 1,000 days since 2018 and already names the DOH, the National Nutrition Council, and LGUs as responsible. Republic Act No. 12028, the ARAL Program Act, carries PHP 8.93 billion in the 2026 national budget for 6.7 million learners. Read the fine print: para-teachers serving as ARAL tutors may be paid from the Special Education Fund — the fund the local school board controls, the board the mayor co-chairs. In April, the World Bank approved USD 600 million for Philippine foundational literacy.

So forgive the skepticism about the Local Education Coalition that came out of the summit. Yee himself named fragmented implementation and weak coordination among the causes of this mess. The answer cannot be one more voluntary body with no charter, no budget line, and no duty to report, which dissolves the moment its convenors leave office.

Try this instead. Publish the CRLA and Phil-IRI results school by school, here and in the north. Convene the local school boards that already exist, and show us what the Special Education Fund actually bought in 2024 and 2025. Then push the ARAL money toward the towns the stunting maps already identified.

Save the Children priced childhood stunting at PHP 328 billion a year, close to 3% of GDP. We have been paying that bill for a generation. EDSUM27 convenes next July (hopefully). Somebody should bring the same slide and see whether the number moved.