The Birth Pains That Marked The Launching Last Year Of K

The birth pains that marked the launching last year of K + 12—a bold program meant to align the Philippines with the global 12-year basic education cycle—are not going away soon, along with the usual problems encountered at the beginning of each school year.
A quarter of the Philippines’ nearly 100 million population are students—some 21 million of them enrolled in more than 46,000 public schools and the rest in private facilities, according to statistics from the Department of Education (DepEd) for the school year 2011-12. (Figures from the last school year remained unavailable.)
Classes in public schools begin Monday—in some impoverished areas under the trees and still in others under tents, particularly in the Compostela Valley, where buildings were flattened in the devastating onslaught in December by Typhoon “Pablo” and remained unbuilt.
On May 15, President Aquino signed into law the program mandating Filipino pupils to attend kindergarten, six years of elementary school education, four years of junior high school and two years of senior high school. The signing officially ended the country’s 10-year basic education cycle, which now exists only in Angola and Djibouti.
New learning materials under the revised curriculum for Grade 2 and Grade 8 (formerly second year high school) will again be delivered late, as in last year when the K + 12 program was rolled out. As in the previous year, teachers did not have enough time to prepare. They only had a five-day mass training just before the start of classes.
Still, this second year of the program’s implementation should be better as the DepEd gains experience, said Armin Luistro, the education secretary and former president of De La Salle University, in a recent interview.
“It’s not generally understood and quite hard to explain that the K to 12 is a curriculum reform that involves changes in textbooks, changes in classrooms, retooling of teachers, etc.,” said Luistro. “Even if there is no K to 12, we have to address the backlog in classrooms, toilets, teachers, etc.”
The DepEd started revising the basic education curriculum the past school year in Grades 1 and 7.
“In any undertaking the first year of implementation is faced with a lot of glitches, challenges,” said Education Assistant Secretary Jesus Mateo when asked about the rushed training of teachers and the long delays in the delivery of the learning materials.
For the new curriculum for Grades 2 and 8 this year, the learning materials would again be delivered late, although Mateo promised these would reach the teachers and students earlier—“by the end of June or early July.”
“We made (the curriculum change) gradual, so we will improve as we move along the full implementation. This year will not be as problematic as last year,” he said.
A major change this year was the decision to tap the DepEd’s own experts in the field and in the main office to develop and train the teachers for the new curriculum.
The department previously sought the help of mostly university educators as subject area convenors to develop the teachers’ and learners’ materials.

K-12 Curriculum in the Philippines
Understanding by Design, Teacher
By daniellecruz
Oct 4, 2012
723 Words
16 Views

Due to the government’s lack of budget, facilities, and teachers, the K-12 curriculum will be hard to implement. The Philippines is need of better education, not more education. The problem of poor education should be solved first. The Department of Education (DepEd), it is the executive department of the Philippine government responsible for the management and governing of the Philippine system of basic education, should first ensure the people that the quality of their education is excellent.

The problem of basic education in the Philippines is not the length, but the content. Actually, earlier than the K-12 curriculum, the DepEd started updating the way the students are taught. The Understanding by Design (UBD) was introduced as a tool for preparing lesson plans. The original authors of the UBD, Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, state that the UBD is not good for preparing lesson plans. The DepEd should fix the current curriculum for better education, instead of adding new subjects which will probably increase the problem of poor quality education. The curriculum in the Philippines from the past is not good, and the new K-12 curriculum will only add complication to our present education system. The government should focus on fixing the current curriculum before adding major changes so the people would know if the change is necessary and beneficial.

Another problem concerning the implementation of the K-12 curriculum is the cost. “The government does not have the money to fully support today’s ten years. The DepEd should first solve the lack of classrooms, furniture and equipment, qualified teachers, and error-free textbooks.” (Cruz, The K+12 debate, 2010). The government must be prepared for the costs of the implementation of the K-12 curriculum. Keep in mind that the parents are also going to spend more money for their children’s education. Also, a major concern is the qualification of teachers. As a matter of fact, teachers are the reason as to why we are...
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