The Folly and Dangers of K+10+2

Deputy Speaker Gloria Macapagal Arroyo filed House Bill No. 7893 in April, the “K+10+2” proposal to fundamentally change the country’s secondary or high school (HS) education system. In her proposal that the House is currently deliberating, HS will revert to four years and the additional two years or “+2” will only be for learners who wish to proceed to college. This +2 is "post-secondary pre-university". Everyone else will complete HS in four years and may join the workforce at age 16.

It is a terrible and dangerous public and education policy idea.

In my post about the first decade of the K to 12 Law, I discussed the 88-year journey that finally led to the approval of that law in 2013 and the phased implementation of the new K to 12 Program and curriculum starting in 2011.

What I did not emphasize previously: low- and middle-income countries ought to invest more in human development and social services while they become, and be even more, prosperous; they should not wait for prosperity first before embarking on these much-needed public spending.

That is also the case with our country — our GDP was $83.7Bn in 2000, $208.4Bn in 2010, and $394.1Bn in 2021, just as we emerged from the pandemic- and lockdown-induced recession of ’20 and ’21. With a growing economy comes bigger fiscal space — government resources that may be channeled toward desired national development priorities.

All of us, hopefully, agree that a healthy, educated, and safe population is essential to the Philippines of our collective dreams and imagination. It is for this reason that the government has pushed forward with various large-scale programs in the last decade-plus: K to 12, 4Ps (Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program, or Conditional Cash Transfers to the poor), Universal Health Care (UHC), even The First 1000 Days and National Feeding Program laws. When a country has a young population like we do (our median age is 25.2 years old in 2020, 24.2yo in 2015, 23.2yo in 2010), those should be non-negotiables.

Given our young populace, we are poised to reap the demographic dividend — as our population ages with declining birthrates, there will be more Filipinos who are productive and working vs. those who require care (i.e. the very young and elderly). This was the same demographic and development journey that other tiger economies such as Malaysia, South Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam have gone through or are still going through.

Demographic dividend is not guaranteed however.

A country needs to put in the work and investments. It also needs to get rich before it gets old, i.e. what China is experiencing now after its population has officially contracted in 2022, a first in six decades.

All of that is to preface the following points about K+10+2:

1. Basic education investments are about human capital development, not just “international standards”.

While there is no actual international consensus or standard regarding the duration of basic education, 198 out of 225 countries in the UNESCO statistics database have durations of 12 years or longer. 23 countries have 11 years, and four including Singapore, notably, with 10 years or less. The proportion of our population who will be disadvantaged with a shorter basic education cycle — those who study or work abroad — is comparatively small but they will definitely be affected. This was and continues to be the situation with a number of our engineers, teachers, and accountants, for example, who had less than 12 years of basic education.

Much more critical, 88% of countries in the world have at least 12 years of basic education because these countries all prioritize the education and learning of their citizens. That is a necessary component of long-term, sustainable, and inclusive development for any economy, and the vast majority of nations and their electorates have long made this commitment.

The Philippines finally joined that roster of countries in 2016, a mere seven years ago.

If K+10+2 pushes through, the Philippines will be the first country — that is not a failed state and since World War II — to willingly and deliberately scale back its basic education system. This is not the kind of first we should aspire for.

2. K+10+2 will displace hundreds of thousands of learners.

After seven cohorts of senior high school (SHS) students, we now have ~3.7M of them each year: 2.1M grade 11 students and 1.66M in grade 12 for SY 2021-2022.

When I started in DepEd in 2011, about 1.2M fourth year HS students graduated each year with more than 800,000 of them proceeding to first year college. The improvements in cohort survival across elementary and secondary education have been significant and encouraging since that time. More Filipinos, today, are able to attend and stay longer in school.

Yes, we have a quality problem in our basic education. Our learning gap is estimated to be 5.5 years — someone who finished grade 10, for example and on average, acquired the intended competencies and capacities of grade 5, at best.

But our children and youth are increasingly in school.

It would be a far more difficult and dire problem if our students were not learning and most of the school-age population were not even participating in basic education. With our girls and boys generally in school, our public and private resources and attention must go into improving the quality, equity, and resilience of their education and learning.

The +2 approach will achieve none of that.

In fact, it will displace and disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of our learners particularly those from low-income and vulnerable families. There are over 10,000 public and private SHSs nationwide but only 2,400+ colleges and universities, most of which are in urban or peri-urban areas.

The State is also not required to fund anything beyond secondary education. Yes, there are decades- and years-long programs that publicly fund higher education and TVET (technical-vocational education and training) and those may be redirected or expanded to support the +2, but those will certainly cost government, taxpayers, and private households more to educate the same number of learners than keeping the current fifth and sixth years of high school.

Would the additional costs yield better results for individuals, families, and our country as a whole?

No.

According to Aniceto Orbeta Jr. and Michael Abrigo of PIDS (Philippine Institute for Development Studies), K+10+2 will be beneficial in the near-term — given the cost savings for government and families with fewer Filipinos studying beyond K to 10 — but having 12 years of elementary and secondary education remains superior. The 9.7% IRR (internal rate of return) for K to 12 vs. +2 is even better than the Pag-IBIG MP2, notes Abrigo.

3. We need to focus on improving the implementation of K to 12 (along with some design choices).

K to 12 has not achieved its intended outcomes. While that is not a debate, it is also premature.

The first batch of learners to complete the entire program entered grade 1 in 2012, will start grade 12 later this year, and will finish senior high in 2024. After they do, there would be better data from K to 12’s first full cycle to assess not just its design or curriculum, but actual implementation more importantly.

A lot of the troubles with K to 12 and SHS are due to implementation issues and challenges, coupled with the pandemic and our ensuing education policies (i.e. no in-person classes for two straight school years, the longest in the world).

Are these concerns fixable? I would argue yes, but they will take time, resources, energies, and commitment from our policymakers, key stakeholders, and the broader public.

There are actually some quick and fairly affordable solutions that could help our learners immediately. For example, government should shoulder the costs of TVET certifications — to the tune of ?1.5Bn yearly — so that SHS students who have completed a senior high TVL (technical-vocational-livelihood) specialization may get the national certificate that could help them land a job should they decide to work rather than proceed to college. The limited number of SHS graduates who have been able to take these TVET certification assessments have a passing rate of 91.4%.

By the way, our own labor force data show that the supposed unemployability of SHS students and graduates is overblown. More than 85% of them, pre-pandemic, who looked for work were eventually employed.?

Yes, their pay may be lower than college graduates or undergraduates but having a job, then having a pathway to lifelong learning and career advancements (as specified in the Philippine Qualifications Framework or PQF), can be a powerful gateway to long-term inclusive growth and shared prosperity.

Our K to 12 reform experience thus far mirrors those of other landmark legislation of the past 30 years: the Local Government Code of 1991, Ecological Solid Waste Management Act of 2000, Electric Power Industry Reform Act of 2001, and Reproductive Health Law of 2012, to cite a few. We would be hard pressed to find anyone that says that those laws are either perfect or perfectly implemented, but our country continues to iterate and build on prior years and decades of implementation.

What we should not do as a nation is to throw our figurative hands up and say, “Sorry, hindi ko na kaya. Suko na kami.”

The Enhanced Basic Education Program was formulated to better prepare our children and youth for the choices and opportunities they will eventually face, whether in further education, world of work, or fulfilling their civic duties as Filipinos. K to 12 and SHS have expectedly gone through a lot of problems during its first decade, and we stand to gain considerably if we apply these hard lessons correctly.

In 1898, Philippine revolutionaries declared independence from our colonizers, (re)started our nation’s still-ongoing experiment toward self-rule and representative democracy, and established Asia's first republic. 125 years later, we find the average Filipino being nearly as rich and productive as people in Vietnam, about half as prosperous as those in Thailand, and less than a third as wealthy as those in Malaysia.

In these still uncertain and trying times, we can curse the darkness and extinguish the remaining light we already possess. Or, we can light more candles to illuminate the way forward.

This June 12, 2023, I am certain that a far greater proportion of our ~110M sisters and brothers would rather be part of the light.

Elvin Ivan Y. Uy

DepEd K to 12 Program Coordinator 2011-2014

DepEd Assistant Secretary 2015-2016

Member, Standing Committee on ECCD and Basic Education, Second Congressional Commission on Education (EDCOM II)