What is the K+12 plan?

In any debate, the debaters first agree on what to debate about. In the public debate about K+12, many participants have differing ideas about what exactly DepEd has embarked on.

To understand the plan better, let us go a bit into the process of implementing it.

This year, School Year (SY) 2010-11, DepEd will design the K+12 curriculum (for convenience, let us call it the Enhanced Basic Education Curriculum or EBEC).

In the case of mathematics, for example, DepEd will sit down with mathematicians from universities, as well as with industry representatives, to identify the set of mathematical facts and skills needed by an 18-year-old entering college or joining the job market. This set is variously called “Minimum Learning Competencies” (or simply “Competencies”), “Qualifications,” or “Outcomes.” These competencies will then be assigned to one of the 12 grade levels in order of importance and difficulty.

Students already in public school will continue to follow the current Basic Education Curriculum (BEC) and will graduate, as they expect, after Fourth Year High School.

Next year, SY 2011-12, DepEd will try to get all five-year-olds to go to Kindergarten.

DepEd has taken seriously the findings of researchers that Grade 1 students should not stay for more than four hours in school (the research has to do with learning capacity). Since Grade 1 students will go home earlier, classrooms will be freed to take in Kindergarten students. There will, therefore, be no need for more classrooms nor more teachers. (Grade 1 teachers can teach Kindergarten.)

Meanwhile, DepEd will start training teachers in the new curriculum (for convenience, let us call it the Enhanced Basic Education Curriculum or EBEC). To continue using Mathematics as our illustration, notice that a major difference between BEC and EBEC is that the academic track of EBEC has Calculus in Grade 12, but BEC does not have Calculus at all.

In SY 2012-13, students entering Grade 1 and Grade 7 (First Year High School) will follow EBEC. Instead of having to cram 12 years’ worth of subjects into 10 years, they will go deeper, more leisurely, and more effectively into those subjects.

In SY 2013-14, SY 2014-15, and SY 2015-16, high school students will continue through Grades 8 to 10.

At the end of SY 2015-16, all students will attend graduation ceremonies and receive a diploma. (DepEd is still deciding whether the diploma will be called Junior High School Diploma or simply High School Diploma.)

Students will then have four options. First, they can just leave the educational cycle completely and live unhappily ever after with their (Junior) High School Diploma. Second, they can immediately apply for admission to Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). Third, they can take two extra years (Grades 11 and 12) to prepare for college; this is the academic track or college preparatory Senior High School (SHS). Fourth, they can go to the technical or TESDA track of SHS to acquire specialized skills required by companies hiring 18-year-olds.

In SY 2016-17, students taking the second option can seek admission to college. (Remember that HEIs are constitutionally guaranteed academic freedom, which includes the right to impose or not to impose admission standards.)

It is important to realize that the Bologna Process, the Washington Accord, foreign graduate schools, and so on require that our basic education system should have 12 years; they do not require that an individual undergo 12 years of basic education. (If I may be immodest, I can cite myself as an example. I was accelerated twice in elementary school and graduated at 14 from high school. That did not keep me from being admitted into a nationally-ranked American doctoral program through a Fulbright grant.)

Of course, unless they are exceptionally smart, students entering an engineering, economics, or similar program will find that not having taken Calculus in Grade 12 will be a major disadvantage. Average students will be forced to take extra college years doing Calculus (and all the other academic subjects offered in Grades 11 and 12), in the same way that HEIs are currently doing remedial work through the General Education Curriculum (GEC).

Still in SY 2016-17, students taking the third option will be taking subjects taken by high school students everywhere else in the world (for example, Calculus). They will also have two more years of English, Filipino, Math, Science, and Social Studies (Makabayan), which will then allow them to fulfil the expectations spelled out in the proposed Revised GEC (“The GE program assumes that high school graduates applying for admission into an HEI will have the linguistic, scientific, mathematical, and creative knowledge and skills necessary for higher-level academic work. In particular, GE courses presume higher-order thinking, speaking, listening, reading, and writing skills that students should already have before they are admitted as tertiary students.”)

Students taking the fourth option will have several specializations open to them. These specializations will be determined by the industries that have already committed to hire SHS graduates. At the end of Grade 12, a technical student will earn not just an SHS diploma, but a TESDA certification and, more important, job offers. DepEd has even thought of a way to help technical SHS graduates that decide to go to college anyway. (To be continued)