WHAT quality education can we expect in overpopulated, poorly-ventilated classrooms where students are wanting of books and teachers are overwhelmed with non-teaching duties while both have grumbling stomachs?
The dismal quality of education has always been the concern of teachers on the ground. It is in the heart of every issue that teachers have been putting forward ever since — from big class size, to lacking materials and personnel, to teachers’ overload and meager pay, to the doubtful K to 12 program.
There are long-time unaddressed shortages in education needs due to insufficient state funding and inefficient implementation as major factors in the education quality backslide. For a government that puts too much emphasis on being “globally competitive”, never has it subscribed to the international standard of allocating education budget equivalent to 6% of the gross domestic product as ours only account to 2–4% of the GDP every year, worse, the meager allocation is not maximized and big funds are misspent or left unspent due to inefficiency.
These have resulted to grave repercussions to education quality as the teachers’ and students’ respective working and learning environment deteriorated.
Also, DepEd’s tack of dichotomizing access and quality is problematic. Its mandate is to provide free, quality education for all, therefore access and quality should be developed hand-in-hand. Previous years’ one-sided stress on access has actually taken a toll on quality as schools are compelled to take in all enrollees but capacities are not sufficiently expanded and improved, thus making quality suffer.
The implementation of K to 12 program only worsened the shortages while it steered education to the wrong direction. The unaddressed shortages were aggravated with the addition of senior high school while the problems in funding and implementation remained unaddressed.
The K to 12 program’s direction of producing cheap and skilled labor force for the global market has resulted into a convoluted curriculum. Primary education used to focus on reading, writing, and arithmetic but K to 12 charged too many competencies while allotting shorter time periods for every subject.
Actions to the K to 12 program should not be limited to review and updating but a thorough assessment and evaluation to see if it really advanced the education objective for national development.
