'Starting Where the Children Are': Process Evaluation of the Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education Program Implementation

The primary rationale of the Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE) program is to start where the children are, which means building upon what children already know.1 It is designed to implement a learner-centered education from the beginning of the education ladder. The MTB-MLE policy may be in its infancy in terms of official implementation, but it already has a long and unrecognized history in Philippine education. Implemented along the margins of dominant language-in-education policies as "auxiliary" medium of instruction (MOI) from the turn of the century until recently, the mother tongue (MT) became the primary MOI and the official language-in-education policy of the Department of Education (DepEd) in 2009 via Department Order 74. This process evaluation sought to determine the status of the program since the passage of Republic Act 10533 or the Enhanced Basic Education Act of 2013. It specifically looked at program theory, service delivery and utilization, and program organization. To capture the breadth of conceptual and implementation issues, 18 public and private elementary schools were randomly selected for the study. These schools were either private- or public-school systems, distributed according to DepEd's typology of small, medium, and large schools; island groupings of Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao; and from both linguistically diverse and less linguistically diverse contexts. Key informant interviews with former and current DepEd officials at the national, regional, and division levels, as well as focus group discussions with teachers and parents, were done. An online survey was also conducted to determine the extent of the program's implementation at the school level. Findings show the breadth of challenges emanates from its conception to implementation stages. The online survey revealed that while almost all schools are implementing the program, the quality of implementation may be wanting as less than 10 percent of schools surveyed have done the four activities needed to implement the program well. At the conceptual level, the program had to deal with linguistic diversity in the classroom, which challenges the primary model of implementation that assumes that a child is exposed to only one MT, rather than possibly several. At the implementation level, the program has been hampered by procurement issues and lack of designated funds for the program's operational activities, forcing the program to compete with other school ne