This study examines the pilot implementation of a summer reading program in Region IX: Zamboanga Peninsula in the Philippines. The program sought to help students who struggle in reading achieve grade-level proficiency. Using publicly available administrative data, we compared outcomes of public schools in the treatment region to those in regions with similar socioeconomic characteristics. This study utilized school-level balanced panel data drawn from end of school year 2024–2025 (pre-program) and beginning of school year 2025–2026 (post-program) to determine whether the summer reading program had an effect on summer learning loss. This study employed doubly robust differences-in-differences (drDID) method to estimate the average treatment effect on treated since the selection of the pilot region is not random. Further, we restricted the sample to public schools using Sinugbuanong Binisaya and Tagalog as medium of instruction (MOI) to satisfy the common support assumption in drDID. Our analysis showed that the program was effective in reducing the proportion of struggling readers and increasing the proportion of grade-level readers in Grade 1 but only for schools that use Sinugbuanong Binisaya as MOI. On the contrary, the program increased the proportion of grade-level readers in grade 2 regardless of the school’s medium of instruction. Our findings highlight the importance of adapting reading remediation programs to cater different language settings. With recent mixed evidence on summer learning loss and the effects of summer programs, the results of this paper offer perspective from a developing country experience operating under a multilingual education context.

Authors:
Dianne Jade Calay, Waseda University, Japan

About the Presenter(s)
Ms. Dianne Jade D. Calay is a Master’s student in Policy Sciences at Waseda University, studying the causal impact of a summer reading program in the Philippines.

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