A committee of the House of Representatives has told the Department of Education to produce textbooks with “nil to zero” errors as it cited the need for “more stringent measures” in the preparation of school materials.
At the resumption of the congressional inquiry into the distribution of “error-filled” educational materials, Committee on Public Accounts chairman Jose Singson Jr. said that education officials have yet to convince the House panel that actions taken to address the problem “do not give lawmakers confidence that mistakes will not happen again.”
“Basically, the DepEd has not assured us that its quality assurance teams are effective. These have been in place before yet errors were still committed,” Singson, the nominee of the party-list group Probinsyano Ako, said during the hearing.
Earlier, Singson disclosed that the House panel will study the possibility of imposing penalties against persons behind error-filled textbooks and learning materials.
“We cannot allow our youth to learn a mistake and grow with it. For us to ensure that errors are not published, we have to take stronger measures to address the situation,” Singson later told reporters.
In the same hearing, he said that the public accounts committee will also prepare recommendations to allegations that DepEd had defied provisions of Republic Act 8047 or the Book Publishing Industry Development Act.
COA, in its 2018 annual audit report for DepEd, also noted that the department violated provisions of RA 8047 that directed it to phase out its book publication and distribution duties.
COA Supervising Auditor Job Aguirre confirmed that DepEd has continued to defy provisions of the RA 8047 that assigned the National Book Development Board (NBDB) and the private sector the job of publishing and distributing books for elementary and secondary education.
“We confirm and we still maintain that they (DepEd) continuously violate RA 8047. But we believe that this problem can be resolved by the passage of an enabling law,” said Aguirre.
Aguirre also admitted that COA has not taken any action on DepEd’s failure to comply with the audit recommendation to stop encroaching into NBDB’s authority granted by RA 8047.
Deputy Speaker Rodante Marcoleta decried DepEd’s apparent refusal to comply with the audit recommendations. He noted that DepEd didn’t even “find the courtesy of responding to the COA report.”
Marcoleta, the nominee of the party-list group 1Sagip, said DepEd’s continued defiance of the COA exhortation to follow the law is “unfathomable.”