Next admin to put K-12 on hold?

                            

The opening of classes in the kindergarten, elementary and high school levels, as well as in some colleges and universities, was greeted with the usual complaints like the perennial shortages of classrooms. Following the example of the University of the Philippines, Ateneo de Manila, De La Salle and University of Santo Tomas also moved the opening of their school year 2015-2016 to August to align themselves with the global scholastic calendar.

Broadcast news had a field day with their usual fodder – stories of school children having to cross rivers or walk not a few kilometers to go to school in the morning and back home in the afternoon in far-flung provincial barangays.  But what fizzled out was the threat of massive protests by some teachers against the K-12 program which added two years of senior high school to the erstwhile four-year secondary curriculum.

Under K-12, the two senior high school would be Grades 11 and 12 which will first roll out in the 2016-2017 and 2017-2018 school years, during which colleges and universities would practically have few or little freshmen and sophomore enrollees.   From 2016-2018, some 2,500 college professors and instructors teaching first and second year subjects would be without jobs unless they are given special dispensation by the Department of Education (DepEd) to teach senior high school subjects.

The government and the private sector should absorb those college professors and instructors who would be without jobs for two years. After all, these are some of the brightest minds in the country and they certainly can help any enterprise that would sort of “adopt” them until the first batch of high school students to go through K-12 would have graduated in March 2018. 

The loss of jobs and the initial shock of adding two more years in school for children are considered by K-12 proponents as mere “birth pains” that must be endured to improve the quality of education in the Philippines. As of now, only UP remains in the top 100 colleges and universities in Asia, with Ateneo, UST and La Salle in the top 200.  But only time will tell if the K-12 program is worth the trouble.

One thing’s for sure though, the time to protest against the K-12 curriculum has already passed since the program is being implemented under a law passed in 2013. The executive department cannot choose not to implement K-12 even if all the teachers and professors in the country shout themselves hoarse in protesting against it. Only another law could stop K-12 and none is forthcoming until probably after the next administration to be elected in May 2016. 

Who knows? The first agenda of the next administration may be to put K-12 on hold.  

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Image by www.rappler.com