‘Education czar’

Angara declared he plans to continue the good programs at the DepEd, including the PBEd’s inputs of reviewing the K-12 program. Under the watch of VP Duterte, the PBEd welcomed the DepEd review initially of the K-10 and pilot-tested them in 40 public schools nationwide. This is now implemented as the Matatag curriculum that, among other things, decongested the previous curriculum of subjects taken up from Grades 1 to 10.

Salazar acknowledged as promising the results of the PBEd-commissioned research and survey called the 2024 Jobs Outlook Study. It covered the second batch of graduates under DepEd’s K-12 curriculum. The study involved 299 companies nationwide, including micro-medium-small enterprises (MSMEs), that indicated greater inclination to hire senior high school (SHS) graduates.

According to Justine Raagas, executive director of the PBEd, this study is a follow-up of their 2018 study that looked into the first batch of SHS graduates under the K-12 who entered the workforce. These studies sought to determine the real progress “to make the K-12 promise of employability a reality.”

Salazar and Raagas, along with PBEd deputy executive director Diane Fajardo, presented to us at the Kapihan sa Manila Bay news forum last Wednesday the results of their latest study. Based on the PBEd 2024 survey respondents, four out of five companies are willing to hire and two out of five are ready with policies in place to hire them.

“Our study confirms what we have been saying all along: the problem with K-12 is not by design, but in its implementation,” Raagas pointed out.

“For 12 years, we have been implementing a promising investment in basic education – the K-12 program. It was meant to open doors to jobs or entrepreneurship for graduates. But despite its goals, our education system’s interconnected problems are holding us back from making good on its promise,” Raagas rued.

The K-to-12 Law, also known as Enhanced Basic Education Act of 2013, or Republic Act (RA) No. 10533, was signed by the late president Benigno Simeon Aquino III on May 15, 2013. It comprises kindergarten and 12 years of primary and secondary education. Before K-12 was implemented, there were six years of primary education and four years of secondary education. The K-12 added two more years as Grades 11 and 12, or SHS.

With the first batch of K-12 graduates, the 2018 PBEd study found that only three out of five companies were willing and one out of five were ready to hire SHS graduates, Fajardo cited. The results of the 2024 PBEd study, however, showed that 46 percent of the respondents currently employ SHS graduates, with large firms more likely to hire compared to MSMEs, she noted. Additionally, she further noted, almost half of the companies confirm having available job openings for SHS graduates, specifically in areas of personal service work, sales and clerical support.

“Our findings still point out that there are still challenges and persisting issues in terms of job-skills mismatch. There is also the challenge of K-12 grads competing for roles with college graduates,” Fajardo pointed out.

Although education gets the biggest bulk of the annual budget of the government, Salazar estimated the government spends about P60,000 for each Filipino grade school child per year. “The budget per student has not grown as much. We should be spending more on children,” he pointed out. Much of the DepEd’s annual budget covers only pay for 900,000 public school teachers and administrative personnel and a much smaller amount is left for building new schools and classrooms, Salazar noted.

With the student population growing every year, the absolute amount of the DepEd’s yearly budget is effectively dwindling.

While PBEd commended Congress’ passage of the “free higher education” or the Free Tuition Law in state colleges and universities, Salazar fears the limited resources of the government prevent it from giving more priority funds to the country’s basic education. “While it’s correct for us to have free higher education, we can still tweak that a bit because we really need to spend much more on basic education,” he exhorted.

At present, Salazar noted with dismay the seeming uncoordinated efforts among the DepEd, Commission on Higher Education (CHED) and the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA). “What we need to see is a more coordinated effort among different agencies,” Salazar urged.

“One of the suggestions is, like the ‘super-Cabinet secretary’ who coordinates all these departments. We need to have an education czar that coordinates all three,” the PBEd chief stressed.

Being a former member of the Joint Congressional Education Commission, or EdCom for short, Salazar recalled Angara’s discussions with the PBEd and the rest of the stakeholders on how to effectively address the “learning crisis” among our country’s schoolchildren. Offhand, Salazar believes an “education czar” can set into motion the State’s vision for education.

“There must be a clear vision for what we want,” the PBEd president wished.

It would seem our education priorities are all over the place. Incoming DepEd Secretary Angara fits the role of the “education czar” to implement the right ones.