THE Department of Education said teachers’ competence and commitment, and medium of instruction are factors affecting the students’ learning ability.
That may be true. But given DepEd’s penchant for blaming teachers on almost anything, it’s not hard to discern that this may be another scapegoating to evade responsibility for the department’s many policy failures. The K to 12- congested curriculum is horrible at best and resulted to the dismal performance of Filipino grade 4 students among 58 participating countries in the recent international assessment in Math and Science proficiency.
DepEd’s incompetence immensely impacts teachers and students’ performance. The poor performance of Filipino students in Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 2019 marks the failure of DepEd’s K to 12 program. Among the outputs of DepEd’s incompetence and haphazard implementation of so-called education reform is curriculum congestion, which compromises adequate teaching time and students’ deeper understanding. This is worsening under the case of blended learning scheme.
The results of the TIMSS 2019 and Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2018 prove that K to 12 did not enhance the quality of basic education in the country. How can we expect to perform well in global assessments if our government continues to turn a blind eye to the perennial problems of shortages in the basic education system? Inadequate funding starves the education sector of the requirements of personnel and for critical inputs in schools, degrades the quality of teaching and learning, and makes education more inaccessible.
And DepEd under the Duterte administration keeps this up under the blended learning system. It’s no wonder that our students perform badly in the 3Rs.
The Secondary Education Development Program (SEDP) implemented in 1989 was evaluated as a curriculum failure because it was found that the curriculum itself is overcrowded by putting together too many competencies and topics. This is also the reason why the curriculum was changed to Basic Education Curriculum (BEC) in 2003.
K to 12 curriculum implements the “chopsuey method” where teachers are forced to teach a little of everything is ineffective in attaining a mastery of skills in Math and Science. Meanwhile, problems arising in distance learning are the mounting number of unclaimed modules, unanswered retrieved modules and dwindling attendance in online classes.
Even before the pandemic, large class sizes in the country’s public elementary and high schools is one of the major factors that undermine quality education thus affecting students’ learning ability. According also to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s Institute, classrooms in the Philippines are among the most crowded in Asia.
The government must realize that there’s a need to review the K to 12 program, create a curriculum that will meet the needs of the society, and invest more in education so we can address the issues of quality education.
