THERE is nothing wrong with wanting to be on par with the rest of the world, particularly when it involves the education of our children. But there is a growing sense that the Aquino administration leaped into the K-12 program—adding two years to the country’s basic education system—unprepared.
This week, as millions of schoolchildren returned to school, some 200,000 to 400,000 who finished Grade 10 were not expected to go on to two more years of senior high school under the K-12 program.
Despite this high figure, outgoing Education Secretary Armin Luistro says this is “the best school opening yet,” since the expected dropout rate will be below 50 percent in previous years.
But Luistro’s statements came amid reports of low enrollee turnout on the first day of school and nationwide protests by youth groups against the K-12 program.
Despite the low initial turnout of enrollees, Luistro said at least 1.1 million Grade 11 students were already enrolled in various schools offering SHS nationwide. With 1.5 million students completing Grade 10 in school year 2015-2016, that still accounts for a dropout rate of 36 percent.
But there is good reason to believe that Luistro, as part of an administration that regularly claims more than it achieves, is being overly optimistic.
Militant groups, in fact, have dismissed his statements as “delusional” and that the true dropout rate will be closer to 1 million, and that the K-12 program has simply aggravated the long-standing problems of the country’s educational system, including insufficient classrooms, poorly trained teachers, inadequate number of textbooks, and, in private schools, yearly increases in tuition.
At the same time, a voucher program that Luistro claims will help public school students attend private schools, will prove insufficient for poor families, the Gabriela Women’s Party says.
As it turns out, the P22,500 vouchers that the Education Department promised as financial aid will cover only up to 80 percent of private school fees, and the balance can eat up to 40 percent of a family’s income for every single senior high school child, Gabriela says.
And because only 48 percent of public high schools have submitted proposals to implement senior high school next year, most public school students will be forced to attend private schools that their families cannot afford.
Citing figures as of the weekend, opponents of the K-12 program said it seems more likely that Luistro’s projections for enrollment this year might be prematurely rosy.
Clearly, the incoming administration needs to review the Aquino government’s claims about our readiness for K-12. We have no problem with the program’s goals, but a national effort of this scale needs more than haphazard preparation and press releases to achieve success. If change is coming, we should be ready for it first.