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This is a concrete step to address the much needed improvements that are sorely needed to improve our basic education and give our graduates better training, with the hope of poverty alleviation down the road.

This is a program that we can and should all get behind! Parents may initially think that this is just a waste of money or it will just serve to delay the graduation of their children. However, this is a long-term investment in their future. If implemented properly, two extra years in school can go a long way in helping our graduates have a better chance at a better future.

If there’s a lasting legacy of PNoy’s administration, it will be this.

Current program

Our current education program has 6 years of grade school and 4 years of high school, resulting in only ten years of basic education. Most of the curriculum involves memorization. To get things going, universal kindergarten was started last 2011 as a transition phase for the changes in the education set-up.

New program

The new education curriculum will be implemented starting this June. It will have 12 years of basic education instead of the current ten year model. The goal of the changes is to better equip our graduates “for recognition of professionals abroad.”

Critical thinking will be another aspect of the program. This will be a much needed life long skill that students can better use in life, instead of memorizing data that won’t have much use upon taken a test or upon graduation.

The President himself has said that the current system is “force feeding” students to “swallow, chew…and there is no chance for students to savor knowledge”. This is why information goes in one ear and out the other.

According to Education Secretary Armin Luistro, with the new curriculum, each Filipino child will be given the necessary abilities requisite of the our century – also called 21st-century skills.

Basic technical competency skills taught at Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA) will now be taught as part of the high school program. At the same time, Commission on Higher Education (CHED) will now move some of the general education subjects that are commonly taught in college to the last years of high school. Those that complete year 12 will be given a national certification by TESDA, certifying that the student has the technical and vocation skills to become employed.

Kindergarten at 6 years old will officially kick off a child’s education program. Although this is still not mandatory by law, the DepEd decided to take initiative and has started this in 2011.

From aged 6 to 11, a student will be in elementary school for 6 years. The difference in the new program will be the introduction of a junior high school and senior high school program.

Junior high school will be considered grades 7 to 10, which accounts for 4 years. The next phase will be a senior high school program lasting 2 years, creating grade 11 and grade 12. This will make the child complete his basic education at 17 or 18 years of age, which is in keeping with the rest of the world.

Each phase of the changes will be introduced in stages, with a year of school being added as time goes on. By 2018, the country should have its first batch of graduates under the new program.

Change is intimidating

When the plans to overhaul the education program of the country were announced, there were mixed reactions. For the parents and students, it seemed like the next few years would be a period of uncertainty. The batches most affected by the changes are those who are currently in grade 5, 6 and 7. Who can’t help but feel like a guinea pig being experimented on?

Many parents simply can’t wait for their kids to get out of school so they can work and help out with the family finances. Our graduates are some of the youngest in the world, at 15 to 16 years of age.

We are left behind

In Asia, we are the only country that still has a 10 year basic education program. In the rest of the world, only two other African nations have a ten year basic education program.

Future plans

President Aquino revealed that in the future, all the reading materials used in the country’s public schools will be “tablet based.” This sounds like a pipe dream since many private schools in the country don’t even have this capability yet. If the President is able to pull this off successfully, then that is another feather on his cap, and certainly a major leap towards the 21^stcentury. Let’s hope the students don’t sell the tablets for quick cash instead.

Currently, La Salle Greenhills has an experimental program that is technology based.

The DepEd has gotten the lion’s share of the national budget, with P238.8 billion in funding, with P2.4 billion for theKindergarten program. However, we need more. The United Nations recommends a minimum of at least 6% of the GDP when it comes to education spending. We currently allot about 3%.

In 2005, the government spent only $138 per student or about P6 a day, which is way below what other nations are spending per child on education. In Thailand, each child gets about $852 a year.

Addressing other issues

It’s about time someone took a hard look at our current education program and did something about it. We are becoming laggards and our graduates are losing their competitive edge. Even our much-touted English ability isn’t all that great anymore. Thanks to texting, our spelling is much worse, grammar is out the window and proper diction is a thing of the past.

We need to keep our students in school. Our country has such a high drop out rate, and many students don’t even make it to high school under the current program. The Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) Program to keep kids in school is a temporary measure. The government should make school more accessible. Perhaps providing free bus service transportation is one way to do it.

Parents need to stop thinking of their children as young free laborers and keep their kids in school. Children need to be in school learning instead of working or begging.

There are still the recurring issues about the need for more adequate classrooms to accommodate the never-ending number of students who need to learn. These classrooms should be equipped with the proper tools and each student should have their basic books and school supplies provided for. We need about P100 billion for more classrooms and P63 million for books.

There is also a need to improve the competency skills of our teachers. Bad teachers can only produce bad students. If the stock knowledge of the teachers themselves are wrong or outdated, then how can they teach their students the latest, most current and relevant information?

Also, the increased budget should be strongly safeguarded against corruption. Graft from procurement is a serious problem that has a very detrimental impact on the education system.

It doesn’t matter how many years of school you put forth if there aren’t any classrooms to put these students in, no good teachers to teach, no books to read and no materials to make use of.

While the issues may seem insurmountable, change will come if we allow it to happen. Hitches are to be expected, but that shouldn’t stop us from trying to improve the situation. The key is in the proper implementation. It will be long after Aquino has left office that we’ll see any results, but we’re keeping our fingers crossed.

Photos from President Noy facebook page. Some rights reserved.

For more information on the K to 12, FAQ from gov.ph
Proposed K 12 Basic Education System in the Philippines
Dean Jorge Bocobo’s commentary On Proposed K 12 Basic Education system
Jane Uymatiao’s Why we need Dep Ed’s K 12 program.

Download K to 12 documents on curriculum and other guidelines

See more on the Mother tongue curriculum.

Mother Tongue K to 12 Curriculum Guide

Proposed K-12 Basic Education System in The Philippines

Originally posted at Philippine Online Chronicles.Want to be part of our Blog Watch Community? Share your perspectives on current issues and contribute to the conversation. Look at it as an op-ed with links. Just register or if you just want to submit a guest post , submit your story. at email address contact at blogwatch dot tv

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Blog Watch is composed of independent-minded bloggers and social media users who leverage new technology tools to advocate social change and serve as a citizens’ watchdog and collective conscience for transparency and good governance.

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Be part of citizen power. Register here in Blog Watch at http://blogwatch.tv/wp-register.php. or send me an email contact at blogwatch dot tv . Is the K-12 model good for the Philippine education system?
by Sarah Katrina Maramag
ViaPhilippine Online Chronicles

The enhanced K-12 program, or the Department of Education’s (DepEd) proposal to overhaul the basic and secondary education curriculum by adding two more years to the system is arguably one of the most drastic and controversial programs of the Aquino administration.

The program is proposed to start in school year 2012-2013 for Grade 1 and first year high school students with the target of full implementation by SY 2018-2019.

K-12 has been met with criticism from youth and student groups, teachers, parents and the academic community. The DepEd, for its part, appears determined to enact the program with its proposed budget catering mostly to preparing the grounds for its eventual implementation.

The DepEd argues that the K-12 program will be the solution to yearly basic education woes and the deteriorating quality of education. Critics, however, counteract that the education crisis needs to be addressed more fundamentally and adding more school years would only exacerbate the situation.

Dissecting K-12

The K-12 model is an educational system for basic and secondary education patterned after the United States, Canada, and some parts of Australia. The current basic education system is also an archetype of American schooling but with a 10-year cycle.

DepEd reasons that it is high time to adopt a K-12 system, attributing the low achievement scores and poor quality of basic education to the present school setup. Following wide protests over the proposal, the department released its official position defending K-12.

Below are the main arguments and corresponding counter-arguments from critics.

1. The K-12 will solve the annual growing number of out-of-school youth. Students and parents, however complain that it would be an added burden to poor families.

While public education is free, a political youth group estimates that a student would still need an average of P20,000 per school year to cover transportation, food, school supplies and other schooling expenses.

Also, based on the latest Family Income and Expenditure Survey, families prioritize spending for food and other basic needs over their children’s school needs. Two more years for basic education would inevitably translate to higher dropout rate.

2. The K-12 will address low achievement scores and poor academic performance of elementary and high school students. DepEd says that the poor quality of basic education is reflected in the low achievement scores of students. Results of the TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study), however, negate the connection of the number of years to the performance of students.

According to results of the TIMSS, the length of schooling does not necessarily mean better scores. In fact, some countries with the same or shorter school cycle garnered the highest scores while those implementing the K-12 model or more years of schooling got lower scores.

According to a study released by former Deputy Education Minister Abraham I. Felipe and Fund for Assistance to Private Education (FAPE) Executive Director Carolina C. Porio, the DepEd’s arguments are “impressionistic and erroneous” because there is no clear correlation between the length of schooling and students’ performance.

The said study shows that fourth graders from Australia had respectable TIMSS scores despite having only one year of pre-schooling, while Morocco (two years of pre-school), Norway (three years) and Armenia and Slovenia (both four years) had lower scores than Australia. South Korea, which has the same length of basic education cycle as the Philippines, was among the top performers in the TIMSS, while those with longer pre-schooling (Ghana, Morocco, Botswana and Saudi Arabia, three years) had lower test scores.

Test scores of Filipino students, meanwhile, were lower than those garnered by all 13 countries with shorter elementary cycles, namely, Russia, Armenia, Latvia, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Serbia, Romania, Moldova, Italy, Egypt and Iran.

In the high school level, Singapore that also has a four-year high school cycle, got the highest score. Ironically, the Philippines got a lower score together with countries that have longer high school cycles like South Africa, Chile, Palestine, Morocco and Saudi Arabia.

For the pre-college level, the Philippines also got a low score, but so did the United States, which has a 15-year basic and secondary education cycle. Students from Singapore, South Korea, Japan and Hong Kong, all with shorter education cycles, got higher scores than America students.

3. The DepEd has enough resources to implement the K-12. Interestingly, countries whose students got high scores in the TIMSS were the ones whose governments allotted high public spending for education.

Despite nominal increases in the total education budget, the government has been spending less per capita on education. The real spending per capita per day dropped to P6.85 in 2009.

From 2001 to 2009, education’s portion in the national budget has steadily decreased. This pales in comparison to neighboring countries – Malaysia, 7.4 percent and Thailand, 4 percent. It is also lower than the four percent average for all countries that were included in the World Education Indicators in 2006. The country is also lagging behind its Asian counterparts in public expenditure on education as a percentage of total public spending.

In a statement, President Benigno Aquino III said that his administration is prioritizing education and, as proof, the DepEd budget will increase by P32 billion in 2011.

However, according to Anakbayan spokesperson Charisse Banez, “Even if you combine the DepEd and SUCs (state college and universities) budgets, it will only equal to three percent of the GDP, a far cry from the six percent GDFP-amount advocated by the United Nations.”

The UN Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (UNESCO) recommend that governments spend at least six percent of their GDP for education.

Former Education secretary Mona Valisno stated in a separated study that DepEd needs at least P100 billion to fully address the shortage of 93,599 classrooms and 134,400 seats and P63 million for textbooks and scholarships.

Proponents of the program allude to the experience of St. Mary’s Sagada – a school implementing K-12 that has been topping the National Achievement Test in Mountain Province. However, aside from the K-12, the school also has a 1:20 teacher to student ratio and is not suffering any sort of shortage in faculty or facilities.

Critics of the K-12 assert that while government resources have been found wanting and insufficient for the present 10-year cycle, how will it be able to afford to fund a K-12 model?

4. The K-12 will open doors for more jobs for the youth, even without a college diploma.

DepEd says that a K-12 program will improve the chances for youth employment as it is aimed to improve technical-vocational skills through focusing on arts, aquaculture and agriculture, among others. The K-12, it further states, will ensure that students graduating at the age of 18 will have jobs, thus making them “employable” even without a college degree.

However, critics are quick to note that the Philippines, that has a predominantly young population, also has the highest overall unemployment rate in East Asia and the Pacific Region. According to World Bank study, the country also has the highest youth unemployment rate. Young Filipino workers are twice as likely to be unemployed than those in older age groups as they figure in the annual average of at least 300,000 new graduates that add up to the labor force.

The Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) reported in 2008 that 50 percent of the unemployed 2.7 million nationwide were aged 15 to 24. Of these, 461,000 or 35 percent had college degrees while about 700,000 unemployed youth either finished high school or at least reached undergraduate levels.

Therefore, the persistent high unemployment rates, may not be necessarily linked with the present 10-year cycle but instead with the country’s existing economic system and the government’s job generation policies.

5. Filipino graduates will be automatically recognized as “professionals” abroad. In the present 10-year cycle, the DepEd argues, the quality of education is reflected in the “inadequate preparation of high school graduates for the world of work or entrepreneurship or higher education.”

What the K-12 program aims to achieve, therefore, is to reinforce cheap semi-skilled labor for the global market. With young workers, mostly semi-skilled and unskilled workers now making up an estimated 10.7 percent of the total Filipino labor migrant population, it comes as no surprise then that the government is now programming its youth to servicing needs of the global market.

Labor migration, however, has resulted in the brain drain of Filipino skilled workers and professionals. Ironically, while the DepEd and the government mouths a so-called “professionalization” of the young labor force in foreign markets, their significance to domestic development and nation-building is sadly being undervalued at the expense of providing cheap labor under the guise of providing employment.

While proponents and advocates hail the K-12 model as the “saving grace” of youth unemployment, critics argue that it will only aggravate the country’s dependence on labor export and the inflow of remittances that do not necessarily contribute to substantive and sustainable nation-building.

A Filipino education

Lastly, the DepEd justifies the K-12 model by saying that the present short basic education program affects the human development of Filipino students.

Ultimately, regardless of whichever “model”, what the youth and country direly needs is for the development and establishment of an education system that caters to the needs of the Filipino youth and the society in general.

The crisis of the Philippine education system, in all levels, is stemmed not on the superficial, in this case the number of schooling years, but rather on the conditions and foundation on which it subsists. Unless the government addresses in earnest poor public spending, high costs of schooling, the predominance of a colonial curriculum, lack of transparency and accountability amid widespread corruption within the sector and the development of the country’s science and technology for domestic development, all efforts will remain on the surface.

And neither 10 nor 12 years would make much of difference.

Photos from POC files. Some rights reserved.

You may also want to read Dean Jorge Bocobo’s commentary On Proposed K 12 Basic Education system and Jane Uymatiao’s Why we need Dep Ed’s K 12 program.

Here is the proposed K 12 basic education from Department of Education

Proposed K-12 Basic Education System in The PhilippinesWant to be part of our Blog Watch Community? Share your perspectives on current issues and contribute to the conversation. Look at it as an op-ed with links. Just register or if you just want to submit a guest post , submit your story. at email address contact at blogwatch dot tv

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