A dizzying roller coaster ride

from Envirex July 2023 Graduation Issue

Kung Paano Maghasa ng Dyamante

It feels necessary for the former president and now Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, to propose House Bill 7893, better known as the “K-10+2” bill, as an update to the K-12 curriculum.

The K-12 curriculum is under review by the Department of Education (DepEd) after the Vice President and DepEd’s secretary, Sara Duterte-Carpio expressed her concerns about the said curriculum. Duterte admitted it is ‘congested and disorganized’ and had failed one of its missions to create labor-competent graduates. The K-12 curriculum that we know today consists of three groups according to TeacherPh’s website: Elementary from Kindergarten-Grade 6, Junior High School from Grades 7-10, and Senior High School from Grades 11-12. Face it. The implementation of K-12 is half-baked. As of May 2023, a decade after its rollout, not all schools that offer Senior High School (SHS) education offer the most in-demand strand, the Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics (STEM strand), according to ABS-CBN News. The most glaring reasons are lack of budget, lack of teachers, and lack of facilities. And it does not help that STEM education is essential to produce students who are competent for STEM-based college courses like Medicine, Nursing, and Engineering.

Another blow to the curriculum is the institutionalized mismatch. SHS has the objective of college preparedness for students. However, this was hindered thanks to strand and course mismatch. Thanks to CMO No. 105 of 2017, it allows students from any strand to take any courses. This feels that SHS is virtually useless considering before Junior High School graduates can even pursue higher education, they first need to be stalled for 2 years of “college preparation”.

And the cherry on top is the aforementioned broken promise for labor-competent graduates. Based on the report of the Philippine Business for Education, 14 out of 70 leading companies in the Philippines are willing to hire graduates of SHS. There is this glaring issue that they obviously prefer college graduates and it leads to 70 percent of SHS students seeking tertiary education for employment, according to Philippine Institute for Development Studies in 2020.

For the most part, the K-12 curriculum felt like an experiment that ultimately risks the education of the hope of the nation. As the nation embarks on the beta test of the academic curriculum, thanks to the aforementioned “K-10+12” bill, politicians better know what they are doing or else they are setting students on a dizzying rollercoaster ride.