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27 October 2014 HON. ROMAN T. ROMULO Chairman, Committee on Higher and Technical Education House of Representatives, Republic of the Philippines Thru: FRANCES MELANIE U. MAURICIO Acting Committee Secretary Dear Hon. Romulo, I write to formally reply to your letter dated 22 October 2014 inviting the undersigned in a committee meeting “...to brief the Committee or provide inputs on the legislative concerns in the attached Agenda within the purview of your agency/ institution to competently address, in particular on the K-to-12 Law (RA 10533) impact mitigation.” In lieu of attendance, I am sending the attached position paper on the matter. I regret that I cannot attend the meeting on October 29 because I have classes on the same day. My warmest thanks to your positive response. Respectfully yours,

David Michael M. San Juan

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Rethinking Educational Policy: Some Notes on K to 12 in The Philippines

David Michael M. San Juan

Associate Professor, De La Salle University-Manila1

Public Information Officer, Alliance of Concerned Teachers-Private Schools

From its inception during the last years of the Macapagal-Arroyo regime to its current

implementation under the second Aquino presidency, the Kindergarten to 12 Years of

Basic Education (K to 12) Program has been criticized and opposed by a broad array of

forces. The current administration swiftly enacted the said scheme through Congress,

without really engaging in genuinely democratic bottom-up dialogue prior to K to 12’s

inception, adoption, and implementation. It is within this context that we are duty-bound

to continuously engage proponents in a dialogue on the merits of K to 12.

Is K to 12 Logical?

The zealous proponents of K to 12 admit that the program is meant to make Philippine

educational standards at par with global standards. They claim that, prior to K to 12’s

implementation in the Philippines, the country shared the notoriety of Angola and

Djibouti, in maintaining a 10-year Basic Education Cycle (pre-university years/primary to

secondary education). They’re quick to point out that Angola and Djibouti are very poor

countries, but at the same time, conveniently forget to mention that, using their own pro-

K to 12 argument, anyone can convincingly say that ALL POOR COUNTRIES, except

Angola and Djibouti, ARE K TO 12-COMPLIANT, and hence it is possible that K to 12 is

partly responsible for these countries’ perennial poverty. Hence, we ask, is K to 12

logical?

Prior to K to 12’s implementation in the Philippines, students were compelled to undergo

kindergarten and a 10-year Basic Education Cycle, before they’re allowed to study at

the tertiary level. Under K to 12, the government says it will fund a 2-year senior high

school on top of the old 10-year Basic Education Cycle. Hence, students will have to

undergo kindergarten and 12 years of pre-university education.

But there lies the problem: do we have the funds to efficiently implement K to 12 at this

point? The government needs to hire approximately 20,000 teachers to provide services

for around 5,575,946 senior high school students. This means the government will have

to spend at least 4,320,000,000 pesos, just for the senior high school teachers’ salaries

for a year (computed with 18,000 pesos as the entry level salary).

Historically, our country is unable to comply with the global standard with regard to

public funding for education as a percentage of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP),

1 For identification purposes only

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pegged at 6%. Thus, regardless of the government’s promise to secure funding for K to

12, we can validly question their inability to fulfill such empty promise, as the following

figures suggest.

FIGURE 1: Public Expenditure on Education as A Percentage of the GDP: The

Philippines vs. Selected Countries (whose Human Development Index rankings

are higher than the Philippines; with the exception of India). Source: UNDP Public

Data Explorer Online.

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FIGURE 2: Public Expenditure on Education as A Percentage of the GDP: The

Philippines vs. Selected Countries (whose Human Development Index rankings

are lower than the Philippines). Source: UNDP Public Data Explorer Online.

The quality of public K to 12 education must be also scrutinized. The Philippine

Department of Education’s current “ideal” teacher-pupil ratios make us think that public

K to 12 education will be very problematic. The public education system under K to 12

will be further stretched out, reaching unsustainable and unmanageable levels.

FIGURE 3: Teacher-Student Ratios in the Philippines, China, USA, Cuba and

Sweden. Source: http://www.gov.ph/2014/03/05/p9-5b-to-fund-hiring-of-31335-

teachers/ and World Bank Database Online.

LEVEL RATIO

PH Kindergarten 1: 25-35

PH Multigrade Elem. 1: less than 30

PH Monograde Elem. (Grades 1-2)

1:40-50

PH Monograde Elem. (Grades 3-8)

1:45-55

PH Secondary 1:45-55

CHINA (elem.) 1:17-18

USA (elem.) 1:14

CUBA and SWEDEN (elem.)

1:9

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In fact, Philippine public schools are so congested that, the government actually

subsidizes the enrollment of 850,000 to 900,000 students in private schools, and the

government expects to subsidize the enrollment of 750,000 to 800,000 private school

students for Grades 11 and 12, come 20162!

Will K to 12 Liberate Us From Poverty?

K to 12’s proponents also claim that the scheme will resolve poverty in the Philippines.

They say that two years of senior high school will churn out millions of young

employable Filipinos who no longer need to study college to land good jobs. They justify

the technicalization of senior high school education via the introduction of track-based

Grade 12 courses, as a means of manufacturing young employable Filipinos who can

enter the job market earlier than the typical Filipinos who were schooled under the old

non-K to 12 system. We have several misgivings on their claims.

One, the average salary of college graduates is higher than non-college graduates as

the following figure says. We do not want our young people trapped in low-wage jobs,

especially under contractual employment set-ups tolerated if not encouraged by pro-

capitalist and anti-labor governments around the world.

FIGURE 4: Average Earnings of Workers Grouped According to Highest

Educational Attainment. Source: “Investing in Inclusive Growth Amid Global

Uncertainty,” a World Bank PHILIPPINE QUARTERLY UPDATE (July 2012).

2 Report culled from: http://www.philstar.com/headlines/2014/06/07/1331973/deped-subsidize-private-

education-400000-hs-students

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Two, citizens from developed countries have higher college enrollment rates and higher

average incomes than poor and developing countries. Hence, K to 12’s anti-tertiary

education mantra is questionable and obviously bad for the country as the following

figure proves.

FIGURE 5: Tertiary Level Enrollment and Per Capita GDP, 2008. Source: “Putting

Higher Education to Work: Skills and Research for Growth in East Asia3,” a World

Bank East Asia and Pacific Regional Report (2012).

Three, encouraging poor citizens to just finish senior high school and stop dreaming of

achieving college education will further worsen the current educational apartheid

observable in the Philippines and other countries where huge income gaps between the

rich and the poor translate to huge gaps in the levels of educational attainment too. Are

we not obliged to pull everyone up?

3 This report emphasized that no country achieved high levels of income without increasing the number of their

college enrollees and graduates.

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FIGURE 5: Education Attainment of Filipinos Grouped According to Socio-

Economic Status. Source: Sakellariou, Chris. Access to and Equity of Higher

Education in East Asia. Background paper prepared for World Bank 2011, World

Bank, Washington, DC., 2010.

Four, it is very obvious that many senior high school graduates will be compelled by the

nature of their education to seek employment overseas or in subsidiaries of foreign

firms in the Philippines. Caregivers, housekeepers, clerks, welders, butchers, English-

speaking agents etc. swiftly churned out every two years will be good news to

exploitative firms abroad and their subsidiaries in the country. Hence, it is valid to

consider K to 12 as complementary to the government’s social cost-ridden Labor Export

Policy (LEP). The LEP was conceptualized during the Marcos dictatorship. More than

twenty years hence, it is still a major government policy. It has brought billions of dollars

of remittances to the Philippines, but at a very great cost. Brain and brawn drain, broken

families, deskilling, and deindustrialization are some of the known effects of LEP on the

Philippines. More than twenty years of LEP’s failure to wipe out Philippine poverty are

enough. Any sane development program for the Philippines should rule out LEP as an

option. Hence, reforming the country’s educational system via K to 12 to suit LEP is not

a good policy. What country would pimp its citizens for wages lower than average

wages in their host countries? Until a global agreement to fix migrants’ wages to the

level of average wages in host countries is adopted, the LEP will never be a good

option.

What’s Wrong With K to 12’s Senior High School and New College Curriculum

Experiments?

K to 12’s proponents claim that they added two years of senior high school at the

secondary level, so that college education will no longer be remedial in nature. They

didn’t bother ask what’s behind the remedial nature of college education in the

Philippines? Why do college teachers tend to repeat what students have supposedly

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learned in high school? The answer is very simple: high school education in the

Philippines is failing as recent National Achievement Test (NAT) results suggest. The

most recent data available says most students and most schools have garnered

“average” achievement level. If Philippine high school education is good enough, most

schools and most students should garner ratings that warrant the labels “moving

towards mastery,” “closely approximating mastery” or finally reaching the level of

“mastery.” Furthermore, over-all, the mean percentage score of high school students is

yet to reach 50% in recent years. In other words, most students actually fail the NAT

(most of them cannot even answer 50% of the items correctly). The following data

speak for themselves.

FIGURE 6. Source: http://netrc.sysportal.net/Frame.aspx?id=2030

FIGURE 7. Source: http://netrc.sysportal.net/Frame.aspx?id=2028

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FIGURE 8. Source: http://netrc.sysportal.net/Frame.aspx?id=2027

College teachers are compelled by the circumstances to do what they can to offer

remedial lessons simply because high school education never worked for a number of

students. Hence, imposing two years of senior high school – without providing ample

funding – will further increase the burden on the backs of the already overburdened

teachers at the secondary level. In the long run, the country’s senior high school

education will be half-baked and ineffective, especially in public schools.

Saying that college curriculum needs to be decongested so that students will be able to

focus on their fields of specialization, K to 12 proponents have craftily engineered the

trimming down of the General Education Curriculum (GEC) in college and claim that,

generally, subjects in college will be “transferred” to senior high school. The “grand

transfer” is of course very problematic on many counts.

Reducing the subjects in the GEC will cause job losses or at least income losses for

around 60,000 to 100,000 college instructors/lecturers/professors, not to mention tens

of thousands of clerks, registrars, secretaries and other education sector employees. In

view of the foregoing, it is should now be clear to the reader that these job and/or

income losses are unnecessary and illogical. Why reduce the subjects in the college

GEC only to add two years in the already overburdened secondary level sector?

K to 12 proponents claim that college teachers should just transfer to senior high

school. It is another problematic solution. Teaching high school and teaching college

students are entirely different things. Teachers will have to reapply and undergo the

usual procedure. Some will be required to take up units in Education and/or pass the

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licensure examination. It is clear that most of college teachers who will be compelled to

teach in senior high school will see their salaries and benefits decreased or trimmed.

The government promises to help them survive the “transition years” through a 10-

billion “stabilization fund” for teachers, but it is unable to explain where such fund will

come from. Even if such fund is made available, isn’t more practical to stop tinkering

with the current curriculum through expensive policy shifts, and instead use the fund to

improve the current 10-year Basic Education cycle first?

The devil is in the details, so there’s also a need to scrutinize the changes in the

curricula. By now, we all know that the national language is abolished as a discipline in

the new college curriculum4. However, few people know that there are no Philippine

History classes in the newly-crafted senior high school level, and that there will be no

study of the Philippine Constitution in the new college curriculum, a clear violation of

Article XIV, Section 3 of the 1987 Constitution.

“Transferring” subjects from college to senior high school means diminishing general

education in college in favor of a highly technicalized and track-based senior high

school curriculum. We ought to be reminded, that, as Carol Geary Schneider5 (2009),

president of Association of American Colleges and Universities says “...a liberal

education also engages students with the wider world and deliberately cultivates both

the capacities to make sense of complexity and the commitment to consider

responsibilities to the larger community. It prepares graduates not just to ride out this

economic storm, or the next one, but to chart a journey through them...a great education

and narrow technical training are not one and the same.” Another article entitled “Who

Killed the Liberal Arts? And why we should care” by Joseph Epstein6 (2012) notes that

“The death of liberal arts education would constitute a serious subtraction. Without it, we

shall no longer have a segment of the population that has a proper standard with which

to judge true intellectual achievement. Without it, no one can have a genuine notion of

what constitutes an educated man or woman, or why one work of art is superior to

another, or what in life is serious and what is trivial. The loss of liberal arts education

can only result in replacing authoritative judgment with rivaling expert opinions, the

vaunting of the second- and third-rate in politics and art, the supremacy of the faddish

and the fashionable in all of life. Without that glimpse of the best that liberal arts

education conveys, a nation might wake up living in the worst, and never notice.”

4 Here’s an article on this issue:

https://www.academia.edu/7510492/Notes_Against_Miseducation_Part_1_Obliteration_of_Filipino_Subjects_in_College 5 From: http://www.forbes.com/2009/08/10/liberal-arts-education-curriculum-degree-opinions-colleges-geary-

schneider.html 6 From: http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/who-killed-liberal-arts_652007.html

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At this point, the timeless warning against unnecessarily trimming down general

education in the movie “Mr. Holland’s Opus” (1995) should be reiterated: “Well, I guess

you can cut the arts as much as you want, Gene (school principal). Sooner or later,

these kids aren’t going to have anything to read or write about...You people create a

new generation of children who will not have the ability to think or create or listen...” Let

us also remember Mr. Chipping’s stirring exhortation in “Goodbye Mr. Chips” (1939): “I

know the world’s changing. I see old traditions dying one by one. Grace, dignity, feeling

for the past. All that matters today is a fat banking account. You’re trying to run the

school like a factory for turning out moneymaking snobs.”

The Way Forward

In general, instead of immediately implementing the K to 12 scheme, we suggest

the overhaul of the current 11-year Basic Education cycle (Kindergarten, Grades 1

to 6 at Grades 7 to 10) and additional investments for state colleges and

universities, and to the whole education sector. Allotting sufficient budget for

education is the first step to improve the 11-year Basic Education cycle.

Currently, the Philippines is an outlier when it comes to the percentage of the

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) allotted to education.

Hence, the additional budget that would be allotted to the K to 12 scheme will be

better spent for improving the current 11-year Basic Education cycle first.

Debates on whether to add 2 more years in high school should start once the 11-

year Basic Education cycle from Kindergarten to Grade 10 is perfected.

Additional investments in the tertiary level, more especially in the fields of research and

development (R&D) are also important. The Philippines lags behind many countries

when it comes to R&D expenditures, hence the country is also weak in innovation and

modernization of technologies in education and other fields, as data from the World

Bank East Asia and Pacific Regional Report (2012) “Putting Higher Education to Work

Skills and Research for Growth in East Asia” would prove.

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FIGURE 9: Higher Education Research and Development Expenditures as % of

GDP.

Additional budget for the tertiary level is important in ensuring that more students will

finish their schooling. It has been proven that the “rate of return” of investment in

studying in college and beyond is huge, as contained in a World Bank Report entitled

“Skills for the Labor Market in the Philippines” by Emanuela di Gropello, Hong Tan and

Prateek Tandon (2010).

FIGURE 10

According to World Bank East Asia and Pacific Region Poverty Reduction and

Economic Management Department Report entitled “Education and Wage Differentials

in the Philippines” (Xubei Luo at Takanobu Terada, 2009): “Tertiary education is to a

large extent a prerequisite for high-paid occupations.” Thus, the anti-college education

mantra of the K to 12 advocates will not be beneficial to the country in the long run.

Therefore, instead of encouraging students not to study in college under the K to 12

scheme, the government must maximize investments in tertiary education so as to

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attract more students to enroll and finish their college degrees. This is one of the keys to

progress, as proven by developed nations. A country with highly educated citizens

would certainly enjoy high levels if sustainable growth in the long run.

Towards Holistic Paradigm Shifts: Rethinking Educational and Economic

Frameworks

Any additional budget for education will be useless unless the education and

economic systems of the country are not reoriented. We can change the subjects as

frequent as we can but we should emphasize inculcating values for national

development and international solidarity, rather than subscribing to dependency on

failed foreign frameworks and the race-to-the-bottom doctrine preached by global

capital. Hence, the country’s labor export policy must be scrapped, including the related

policy that treats schools in the Philippines as mere manufacturers of workers and

professionals for export.

To complement such endeavors, job opportunities within the country must be

broadened through implementing a comprehensive economic plan that focuses on self-

reliance or self-dependence. This can be done through national/nationalist

industrialization, agrarian reform, and modernization of agriculture. Hence, the

Philippines must utilize its resources for its own citizens’ progress, and not merely as

exports to other countries. The Philippines have all natural and human resources

needed by a country to become holistically developed and a net contributor to the global

struggle against inequality and exploitation.

URGENT APPEAL: Suspend the Implementation of K to 12

In view of what has been discussed above, we urgently appeal to authorities to

immediately suspend the implementation of K to 12.

The year 2016 is an election year and hence it is hoped that the impending

political crisis resulting from the imminent displacement of at least 100,000

workers in the education sector, is temporarily defused, to pave the way for a

more enlightened discussion on educational reforms.

Considering that the K to 12 Law has been enacted only in 2013, it just logical

that children who started their Kindergarten education on that year be the first

batch to undergo the K to 12 scheme, if the next round of discussion and debate

favors the adoption of K to 12. Hence, logically, if K to 12 is adopted, its

implementation in college must start in 2025. That will give us ample time to

prepare the whole education system for an overhaul.

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One last note, actually, the only quantitative research on this matter cautions

against adopting a 12-year Basic Education Cycle. In the study “Length of School

Cycle and the Quality of Education” by UP Professor Abraham I. Felipe and Fund

for Assistance to Private Education (FAPE) Executive Director Carolina C. Porio,

it was found out that “(t)here is no clear empirical basis in TIMSS to justify a

proposal for the Philippines to lengthen its education cycle...There is no basis to

expect that lengthening the educational cycle calendar-wise, will improve the

quality of education...”

Felipe and Porio further emphasized that: “The value of the 12-year cycle is

ultimately a matter of weighing the large and certain costs against the uncertain

gains in lengthening the education cycle. However, one can adopt a guideline in

weighing these costs and gains. One such guideline may be that individuals who

are inconvenienced by non-standardised cycles should be the ones to bear the

costs of reducing those inconveniences. People in the farms and small

barangays should be spared the burden of a system that will not benefit them.

The government could help those interested in foreign studies and work

placement by supporting an appropriate system of assessment, rather than tinker

with the whole cycle length. This solution addresses the alleged problem in a

more focused way and does not indiscriminately impose on every Filipino the

costs of meeting the needs of a few.”

Hence, premises considered, we reiterate our stand to temporarily suspend the

implementation of the K to 12 program.