SENATOR-ELECT Sherwin Gatchalian on Saturday urged the incoming congressional leadership to give priority to the convening of the Joint Congressional Oversight Committee on the K-12 Program when the 17th Congress opens on July 25.
Gatchalian, outgoing Valenzuela City representative, made the proposal in response to mounting tensions between the government and civil society groups concerning the ongoing full implementation of K-12 or additional two years in the basic education.
Gatchalian pointed out that Section 13 of Republic Act No. 10533, popularly known as the K-12 Law, provides for the creation of a Joint Oversight Committee to “oversee, monitor, and evaluate the implementation” of the law.
“The legislative branch of government must step in to fulfill its critical oversight function as mandated by the K-12 Law. We need to objectively assess the facts on-the-ground in order to craft legislation and recommend executive actions which will address K-12’s shortcomings,” Gatchalian, a member of the House committee on basic education and culture in the 16th Congress, said.
Gatchalian proposed that the K-12 Oversight committee shall investigate the effect of full K-12 implementation on high school dropout rates. The Department of Education has reported that around 1.1 million students have enrolled in grade 11 for the 2016-2017 school year, while an estimated 1.5 million students finished grade 10 last year, leaving the status of 400,000 unaccounted-for students in question.
Gatchalian observed that these figures indicate a dropout rate between grades 10 and 11 of almost twenty-seven percent (27 percent), a significant increase from the historical annual high school dropout rate of roughly seven to eight percent (7-8 percent).
“What happened to these missing students? How can we get them back in school? These are important questions that the government needs to answer if we are to prevent K-12 from becoming a feeder program of the out-of-school youth sector,” Gatchalian stressed.
