STRAWS IN THE WIND
Once he takes his oath of office, one of the urgent concerns for incoming President Duterte will be the implementation of DepEd's Kto12 program which starts right next month. For the past five years, officials of the education department have had their hands full preparing for this ambitious initiative whose rationale is to make our educational system be at par with those of other countries in terms of years of exposure. Is the DepEd now ready to embark on this project?
If you ask a senior education official, the answer is "Yes." And this can be understood to mean that the classrooms have been constructed, the teachers have been appointed and trained, and the teaching-learning materials are at hand. But from field reports, the picture is not that good. True, some of the 30,000 classroom programmed for the expected 1.5 million senior high school students this year are being built, but a good number are still on the drawing board. To man the new classes, some 42,000 new teachers are needed. Have these been appointed? Division offices are still in the thick of the selection process. But classes open 18 days from today, who will stand before the thousands of Grade 11 students? As for the teaching-learning materials – textbooks, workbooks, supplementary books, teachers' guide, and of course the equipment for technical-vocational subjects–where are they? Some of these are already available, say some officials, but a good number are still missing.
One back-up strategy for the program innovators is to use the private schools in the area most of which have extra classrooms and qualified teachers who can handle incoming Grade 11 students. Tuitions for these enrollees will be paid by the government under the so-called "voucher system" for which each student will be allotted from P18,000 to P22,000 depending on the category of the city or municipality where the school is located. The amount is for one school year, which of course is very much less than the P30,000 to P40,000 most private schools collect from their students for the same period. Who will subsidize the difference? The parents, of course, that is, if "kaya nila." The problem is that most parents can't afford such subsidy, hence a good number of prospective senior high school students could be disenfranchised.
The ideal solution is for the government to raise the subsidy per student to an amount equal or almost equal to the regular tuition of students. But can it spare more billion for this? For school year 2016-2017, the available fund is reported to be P22 billion, already a big slice from the general appropriations fund.
Using private schools as back-up units for K to 12, however, is possible only for city-based senior students because these schools are available in their areas. But what about in the countryside where no private schools operate, where will the students do their studies? The answer of course is for the government to operate senior classes in these areas. But again this will require more billions from its coffers.
The possibility of thousands of young people who could be deprived of senior high school education is the reason why some observers have branded the K to 12 program as anti-poor. Without going through this program, one cannot proceed to college and without a college education, where's a young person's chance of moving up the social ladder? Proponents argue that the tech-voc offerings of the program ensure a student of employment after finishing the course. But this can happen only if enough equipment and qualified teachers are available, a situation which cannot be expected of government schools considering fund limitation. Employment will also depend on available job offerings in the community and this will happen only if there are manufacturing or industrial entities which are in need of technical workers. The alternative for senior school finishers is therefore to seek employment abroad, a current trend from which they can earn dollars but which is inimical to a healthy family life.
These and many more concerns in education will confront the incoming Duterte presidency.
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