OPINION: K-12 is 6 years of high

school for nothing

By Cristina C. Chi
Updated 10:09 AM PHT Mon, November 12, 2018
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Is the K to 12 education system as effective as the government promised it to be? One of the first graduates of K to 12
writes about the failures of the new education system and how the DepEd may improve it. Photo by JILSON TIU

Manila (CNN Philippines Life) — Today, it appears that the first students to graduate from K to 12
have been forgotten and swept in the dustbin of history. After enduring two additional years of high
school where the implementation was unclear for teachers and students all throughout, the guinea
pigs of the K to 12 reform have every right to be distressed at the Department of Education’s lack of
evidence of its success.

Employability was the top selling point of the K to 12 curriculum, but it was clear as early as January
of this year that graduates of senior high school, or Grade 12, would not be able to compete in the
workforce as promised by the Department of Education (DepEd). A 2018 JobStreet report shows that
only 24 percent of employers were willing to hire K to 12 graduates as the rest still cited having a
college degree as the primary qualification for employment. Worse, the department currently has no
data on how many senior high school graduates were able to find work related to the track that they
had completed.

For instance, senior high school graduate Luis* studied in a relatively small college in Pasig City with
a tuition fee that only cost ₱10,000 per semester. He took up Information in Communication and
Technology (ICT) because of his interests in computer science. However, because of the limited
space in the school and the difficulty of hiring teachers who could teach the advanced subjects, Luis
never thought of any other job opportunity in his track aside from entering the call center industry.
Additionally, he says that the “poor implementation of senior high school” in his school had contributed
to the year-long mess that he and his classmates experienced.

“Most students are angry because of the school’s curriculum. In fact, the school doesn’t follow the
prescribed curriculum anymore. They just force the students to join their weekly event and pay some
money to pass the exam which is very wrong,” he says.

Luis, who needs to support himself now that he is living away from his parents, plans to continue to
college after a year of working as a customer service representative in a call center.

“I guess there’s more to ICT than working in a call center, but I don’t know. I didn’t learn much [from
senior high school].”

Alexandra Villacorta, a Humanities and Social Science student from a senior high school in Antipolo
City, also tried to find a job after graduating. She applied for jobs in different companies but didn’t get
call backs for certain interviews because she had not yet finished 2 years of college.

Alexandra, who was a former literary writer in their school paper, settled for whatever jobs that were
available.

“I started small. I took home ₱250 a day for house cleaning and tutorial services before I decided to
work in the call center,” she recounts. “When I started getting sick from the night shifts, I decided to do
e-commerce instead and be my own boss.”
Now deciding to take a gap year, Alexandra plans to continue to college after earning enough money.
For her, being a senior high school graduate is not enough.

“My mom almost didn't finish her schooling once she started earning money during her time,” she
says. “Hindi pwede ‘yung ganitong klaseng buhay lang. I earn for my education because I know I'll
find purpose in it.”

And for a curriculum that has banked on producing globally competitive graduates with “21st century
skills,” it’s going against its own mandate by merely producing cheap labor for outsourcing agencies
and multinational companies. We don’t need creative imagination to deduce which jobs are waiting for
thousands of senior high school graduates from small schools in low economic areas: blue-collared
work in factories or customer service work in call centers or fast-food chains — jobs that have been
accepting high school graduates even before K to 12 was introduced.

If this is the case, then two years of tuition fees, insurmountable effort, and time from the students’
part had gone to waste as they had only ended up in the same inhumane Philippine labor force
where labor rights are routinely violated. When you have an education system that seems to be riddled
with more problems than solutions, students are the ones to take the hit the hardest. K to 12 worsens,
not improves, poor families’ conditions by aggravating their circumstances with added costs of
education.

Birthing pains

Introducing an educational reform as big as K to 12 will always result in birthing pains, but this does
not mean that the government will cease to be accountable to the students that were experimented
on. Birthing pains can very easily turn to permanent wounds to the Philippine education system that
seems to be only one bruise away from collapsing altogether.

In my high school, the San Beda University Senior High School, Media and Information Literacy was
taught like a confused arts class where students are typically asked to submit drawings and slogans.
For our performance task, we took different pictures of sceneries based on the photography angles
we learned in class. Students from other classes were asked to submit videos of themselves
performing spoken word poetry. I don’t remember any discussion on fake news, critical thinking, fact
checking sources, and other topics that would actually make a student media literate, as the name of
the subject implies. In fact, my teacher in the subject was a graduate of Computer Science and
Physics.

While I understand that my school (and my teacher) may have only been following DepEd’s
curriculum, we must be clear about what senior high school’s subjects are all about and hire teachers
who have extensive knowledge about the subjects. Teachers should have more access to enrolling in
master’s degree programs to be able to guide the students effectively and to have a solid background
in the subject. We should not merely throw hooray words like “global,” “international,” and “21st
century” around to make the subjects appear different from its Junior High School counterparts when
in reality, they are the same basic subjects that provide redundant information.

The new curriculum and the addition of two more years of high school should be evidence-based, but
even one of the only systems of assessment of Grade 12 students’ knowledge, which is the National
Achievement Test (NAT), had been delayed. The NAT was originally scheduled before the end of the
school year, but we ended up taking the test as late as April.

According to San Beda University Senior High School’s Assistant Prefect for Student Activities
Benjamin Sonajo, the NAT for our batch was pushed back twice because “the printing for testing
materials had been delayed.” As a result, the two-day test was attended by only half of our class.

How can the DepEd accurately measure the improvement of students’ knowledge during senior high
school when its few systems of assessment had not been prepared for by department officials?
Problems with the printing of the booklets are not an excuse in this scenario — they had two whole
years to prepare for the evaluation of the new reform which had been contested by many as useless.
Senior high school, which was also tagged as college preparatory as it claimed to give students the
fundamentals of all general education subjects in college, risks being truly useless if the department
will not conduct thorough research on its first implementation.

DepEd’s accountability

“Education either functions as an instrument which is used to bring about conformity or it becomes the
practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and
discover how to participate in the transformation of their world,” was how Paulo Freire wrote about
education in his book “Pedagogy of the Oppressed.” This is more relevant than ever as Education
Secretary Leonor Briones moves to review the K to 12 curriculum.

It’s important that DepEd proposes concrete, long-term solutions based on evidence if it wants K to 12
to work. They should stop tagging senior high school as an alternative to college for those who would
like to work immediately after graduation, as this leaves plenty of students at risk of becoming cheap
robots tied to manual labor. Education should be the force that liberates students from being stuck in
the cycle of poverty, but if things continue the way they are, more and more Filipinos will be hard
pressed to even finish senior high school.

For K to 12 work, DepEd should invest in the primary executors of its curriculum who can translate its
aims from paper to practice. Teachers who are overworked and underpaid are at a risk of being spread
even thinner from the addition of two more years of high school. The answer to this problem is to
increase the pay of teachers and to offer more advanced education opportunities for them to
effectively teach the new subjects in senior high. Just like us, they too are blindly groping in the dark
as to how to navigate an unknown system. They shoulder the heavy responsibility of making sure the
new education reform will work — it follows that they deserve all the support they can get.

Lastly, the government should take steps to address the lack of classrooms in public schools with the
increasing population of high school students and the poor procurement of learning materials. They should
also revise the senior high school curriculum and carefully oversee the implementation of first-time
subjects such as Media and Information Literacy; Trends, Networks, and Critical Thinking in the 21st
Century; and conduct a comprehensive review of the curriculum before selling it as a two-year
solution to make high school students job-ready. Education reforms need to be given a chance, but
we must remember that the students suffering from the experimentation deserve a sure future, too.

As of press time, the Department of Education’s website for Frequently Asked Questions on K to 12 has
been wiped of its old contents where I used to read about how I would become job-ready after
graduating from senior high school.

This shows that the department, in its efforts to review the whole curriculum, should still answer to the
very real concerns of the pioneer batch of K to 12 who are still trying to reconcile what seems like two
years of wasted time and resources. A tall order? Perhaps. But senior high school had no significant
impact to the majority of students who worked or proceeded to college.

In the end, we have thousands of students who feel they’ve been delayed by K to 12, including me.

*Name has been changed at subject’s request.