Re-orient, overhaul K-12 - ACT

ACT Press Release
February 27, 2020

QUEZON CITY – As the House Committee on Basic Education and Culture tackles today the ‘long overdue’ review of the K to 12 program, the Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) Philippines issued its urgent call for the government to re-orient the Philippine education system towards a ‘nationalist, scientific, and mass-oriented education.’ The group said that since their long time call for a thorough evaluation of K to 12 has finally been granted, the government shall take bold measures to correct the ‘problematic program,’ which will entail a ‘complete overhaul’ in the service of national interests.

“The key issue with the K to 12 program lies in its core objective, which aims to produce graduates who are immediately ready to work as semi-skilled and cheap laborers here and abroad. The program exploits the majority of impoverished Filipinos for the gain of foreign capital, foregoing the objective of honing the country’s human resource to serve the purpose of national industrialization and development,” criticized ACT Secretary General Raymond Basilio.

Basilio also hit the curriculum’s removal and weakening of integral subjects for the development of nationalism and core values among the youth. ACT cited the removal of Philippine History in high school, the shortening and simplistic presentation of Araling Panlipunan, the faulty implementation of the mother tongue-based multilingual education (MTB-MLE), and the conservative and individualistic approach to Edukasyon sa Pagpapakatao (EsP).

“These are clear manifestations of the neoliberal and colonial character of K to 12. It retards instead of advances the process of molding patriotic youths whose aspirations are interlinked with that of the entire nation and who shall later contribute to national development,” lambasted Basilio.

Further exemplification of the problematic program, said ACT, can be seen in the curriculum’s emphasis on producing ‘outputs’ at the expense of the development of higher-level literacy, critical thought, and scientific approach in problem solving. The group cited that not only was time allocation for each subject shortened but an even smaller portion is dedicated to discussion, while the bigger share of time goes to activities supposedly meant to exhibit students multiple forms of intelligence.

“K to 12 curriculum was implemented alongside an array of policies for teachers, which included a very strict budget of work in our congested daily lesson logs. Little focus is given to the thorough digestion of lessons as both students and teachers are pressured to produce multitude of outputs on a daily basis. Such follows the neoliberal framework of efficient production in which output is generated at record time for maximum profit,” said Basilio.

Add to that the spiral progression approach of the K to 12 curriculum, which ACT claimed ‘messed up and fragmented’ students’ education.

“In the old curriculum, an entire school year is dedicated for the learning and mastery of different subjects, which progresses into more complex and advanced levels as students likewise proceed to higher levels of schooling. The new curriculum, however, integrates a little of everything without honing mastery, then immediately moves on to the next field, all within a single school year. Students will then go through the same cycle of subjects and fields but with more complex contents in the following year,” lamented Basilio.

ACT notes that these issues do not yet mention the haphazard implementation of K to 12 and the government’s failure to provide the budgetary, logistical, and administrative requirements of the program, which led to a host of other serious problems such as the worsened shortages in learning resources, the perennial problem of insufficient classrooms, wanting training for teachers, lacking education support personnel at the school level, among others. All these created a substandard quality of education, which is mostly made up for by overworked and underpaid public school teachers, added ACT.

ACT also cited the results of the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the National Achievement Test (NAT), and the Philippine Informal Reading Inventory (Phil-IRI) as proof of the further decline of education quality under the K to 12 program.