WHAT will happen to college faculty affected by the Supreme Court decision siding with the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) on the exclusion of Filipino and Literature from the General Education core curriculum?
CHED should craft and implement a massive retooling and jobs program to make sure the college faculty affected will still have work.
The CHED K to 12 Transition Program must be extended and be executed much better. There were many problems with this program before. With the lessons learned, we can save the thousands of faculty who could be retrenched because of the Supreme Court decision.
We do hope that the college faculty affected can still be saved from unemployment. By the way, if he were alive today, would Dr. Jose Rizal agree to the removal of Filipino as core subject in college?
Meanwhile, the transition program has been mired in administrative issues, hampering the country’s smooth transition to the K to 12 Program, a study by the state think-tank Philippine Institute for Development Studies revealed.
The program was established in 2015 to mitigate the negative impacts of and ensure a smooth transition to the K to 12 Program. It was aimed to assist higher education institutions in updating their curriculum. More importantly, it was intended to assist faculty members, who are affected by the program, by giving them opportunities for professional development, such as international and local scholarships for graduate studies and training programs.
One of the major problems was the inadequate preparation of CHED to implement it. This could be because the K to 12 Program was initially seen by CHED as a program that should be led by the Department of Education.
Moreover, the study noted that CHED’s Program Management Unit (PMU), the one responsible for operating the K to 12 Transition Program, had a difficult time adjusting to the demands of the program due to the high volume of work that came with its rollout.
Gaps were also seen in the program’s monitoring and evaluation system. Nevertheless, the challenges faced by the K to 12 Transition Program have served as a learning process for CHED, pushing it to implement reforms. These, however, have been overshadowed by the negative perceptions of the program.
One thing CHED could do is institutionalize a continuing review of the program’s policies with stakeholders to ensure continuous improvement. CHED should also continue building the capacities of its PMU staff on basic government accountability mechanisms and procedures. It should also improve its internal communication system as well as its communication and exchange with all stakeholders.
