Ruel B.

De Gracia

Constructive Speech K+12 Education System

The enhanced K-12 program which the Department of Educations (DepEd) proposal to overhaul the basic and secondary education curriculum by adding two more years to the system. 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. The 12-year education cycle will just definitely and heavily add to the burden of Filipino families, majority of which belongs to the poor. Moreover, this will further exploit our teachers to more work loads and less pay in real value. Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, we in the negative side believe that K+12 Basic Education Program in the Philippines is very untimely and impractical due to the following grounds:

1.

Increasing Basic Education from 10-12 years automatically expands the educational financing requirements for infrastructure, personnel, learning resources, training and development. These requirements can only be achieved if the following conditions are met: Currently, national and local government budgets are already strained to the limit and are averting deficit spending. Families are reeling in financial difficulties. And adding 2 additional years could even increase drop-out rates because school-age members of poor families usually sacrifice their studies to economize on daily school allowances so that their siblings can continue their studies. Currently, the government policy on universal access to basic education disallows contributions by parents and students to complement under-funded public school budgets. Even students from families who can afford to pay contributions are thus exempted from giving their share. The educational policy must not destroy the financial viability of private Schools. Otherwise, students which may be orphaned by Private School closures and program terminations will simply create new financial and logistical burdens for the public schools. In this connection, expanding the coverage of the governments educational subsidy to elementary, secondary and tertiary students in private schools is still one of the best ways for reducing educational costs, since most private schools, colleges and universities have lower per capita educational costs compared to public schools, colleges and universities. 2. Increasing Basic Education from 10-12 years requires a higher level of organizational core competence which can only be achieved if the following conditions are met: If the core competencies of secondary schools administrators and teachers can be upgraded to the level of Technical-Vocational and College administrators and faculty. The Senior High School Curriculum requires the core competencies of Technical-Vocational and Tertiary Schools (Junior College). As they are now, our secondary schools cannot manage the senior High School Curriculum. If Teacher Competence can be enhanced to use cost-effective tools and methods, such as information and communications technologies and multimedia but however, currently, it is

estimated that in the public schools, 70% of students are tech-savvy, while only 30% of Teachers are.

Ruel B. De Gracia

3.

Increasing Basic Education from 10-12 years requires a re-programming of the curricula and re-engineering of the entire educational system. This re-programming and reengineering starts from the pre-school, elementary, and secondary, through the technicalvocational and tertiary education levels; aligning them in a step-ladder progression to achieve international professional standards mandated for various industries and socioeconomic sectors. More specifically, 3.1 We need to re-program curricula in the different educational levels by streamlining them to remove obsolete and redundant courses/subjects/contents. We also need to continually benchmark and update curricula based on global standards.
Current educational policies and standards are so rigid they prevent the swift and continuous updating of curricula, course contents and syllabi which is necessary in coping-up with the rapidly changing expertise benchmarks created by global competition. We cannot even invent our own new and cutting-edge courses because our government educational agencies will recognize only those already offered and recognized abroad. So we are always at the tail-end of educational innovation. Furthermore, our government educational agencies are splintered into different kingdoms. There is a need for a Supreme Authority in the Education Sector to orchestrate the synchronization and integration of desired policies, curricula, programs among DEPED, TESDA, and CHED. And this requires organizational re-structuring

3.2 After synchronizing curricula we need to re-engineer the educational machinery so it will be capable of implementing the educational programs effectively and efficiently. I am using the word reengineer because aside from re-structuring educational agencies and organizations we need to overhaul educational management and teaching-learning processes to facilitate faster, more economical, and higher quality learning. The implications of faster, more economical and higher quality learning are:
We must allow parts of the whole to become creative and move rapidly rather than moving the immovable whole, itself. In this connection, we must Give real academic freedom and autonomy to responsible and qualified educational institutions. Decentralize and devolve relevant basic education functions of National Agencies to Local Government Units. This includes co-management of public schools and direct budgetary allocation from local government funds. This may include abolition of Regional Offices and the creation of Regional Desks to coordinate programs and budgets. Full adoption of information and communications technology and use of multimedia resources in both educational administration and teaching-learning processes. Creation of a National Multi-Media Resources Center where all modularized course syllabi, ebooks, e-journals, presentations, films and learning materials needed by teachers can be downloaded through the internet. And learning resource creators from among teachers, authors, and scientists from around the world can also contribute learning materials.

4. Increasing Basic Education from 10-12 years requires that proper consideration of student needs, interests, capabilities and differences be made in the formulation of policy. For example, if the achievement standard, upon which the two (2) additional high school years is calibrated, is based on the expected academic performance of AVERAGE STUDENTS, what options are there for RETAINED STUDENTS, LOW ACHIEVERS and HIGH ACHIEVERS?