K+12: Isang Malaking Kahibangan

Nag-iilusyon na naman ang DepEd na mapapataas nito ang antas ng edukasyon sa pamamagitan ng pagdagdag sa taon ng pag-aaral. Samantalang ang kasalukuyang kalagayan ay hindi matugunan ang mga pangangailangan.

Sa position paper na aking ginawa para sa aking kaibigang si Bernice Abad, narito ang ilan sa mga kadahilan kung bakit hindi napapanahon ang K+12 na programa ng DepEd at gobyerno:

a.) Additional burden on poor families.

Students and parents complain that it would be an added burden to poor families. While public education is free it is estimated that a student would still need an average of P20,000 per school year to cover transportation, food, school supplies and other schooling expenses. 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.

b.) The credibility and capability to implement the program.

The government is not in the position to add 2 years to the basic education cycle when it cannot even adequately provide the minimum conditions for quality education in the existing 10-year system. 

Rather, the government should have a national plan or strategy for providing accessibility, availability and affordability of primary and secondary education. Completion rates for the 10-year basic education cycle show, for every 100 students who enroll in grade 1 only 43 will complete high school. What more are we to expect in this kind of program?

c.) Focus on the current curriculum.

As far as the curriculum is concerned, DepEd should fix the current subjects instead of adding new ones. The problem is the content, not the length, of basic education. We need to have better education, not more education.

d.) Number of years has no connection on academic performance.

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.

We can do in ten years what everyone else in the world takes 12 years to do. Why do we have to follow what the rest of the world is doing? We are better than all of them. Filipinos right now are accepted in prestigious graduate schools in the world, even with only ten years of basic education.

e.) Not enough education budget, poor facilities and other shortages.

With the additional P150 billion needed to cover the additional requirements for the next school year, the government does not have the money to pay for two more years of free education, since it does not even have the money to fully support today’s ten years. DepEd must first solve the lack of classrooms, furniture and equipment, qualified teachers, and error-free textbooks. 

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.

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.

f.) On the issue of unemployment.

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 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.

g.) Production of semi-skilled workers and brain drain.

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.

g.) Problem on the transition period. 

While students are stuck in Grades 11 and 12, colleges and universities will have no freshmen for two years. This will spell financial disaster for many private Higher Education Institutions (HEIs).

Conclusion

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.

K+12 program can be a remedy in a country where fund is not a problem, poverty and corruption do not exist, student-teacher ratio is tolerable, educational facilities and materials are well provided, and teachers are enough and well compensated.

In this problem on education and economy neither 10 nor 12 years would make much of difference.