MANILA STANDARD.

NET
DepEd begins SHS curriculum review

The Department of Education has started the review of the curriculum for the senior
high school grades, DepEd spokesman Michael Poa said.
Poa said the department has just concluded the review for the curriculum for kinder
to Grade 10.

“The President gave us a timeline of around a year to finish the review. We are
trying to decongest our curriculum to focus on the essential subjects and the
basics, like math, reading, science,” he said.

“We want to really look at literacy in a way that we’ll be able to inculcate not
just foundational literacy but also functional literacy,” Poa added.

Vice President and Education Secretary Sara Duterte-Carpio earlier said the
government wants a more responsive curriculum.

She said in its present form, the K to 12 curriculum is “congested” and that “some
prerequisites of identified essential learning competencies are missing or
misplaced.”

President Marcos earlier acknowledged that the education system has “failed”
Filipino children as he vowed to do better to improve the education sector.

“We have failed them. We have to admit that we have failed our children. And let us
not keep failing them anymore. Otherwise, we will not allow them to become the
great Filipinos that we know they can be,” the President said after receiving the
2023 Basic Education Report from Duterte-Carpio.

-MANILA BULLETIN
(Red flags seen in K-12 curriculum revision)
A group of teachers expressed concern about the planned revision of the K to 12
curriculum as laid out by the Department of Education (DepEd) in its Basic
Education Report (BER) 2023.

DepEd, led by Vice President and Education Secretary Sara Duterte, delivered the
BER 2023 on Jan. 30 to present the current status of the country’s basic education.

The agency also launched its “MATATAG” education agenda to address the challenges
faced by learners, teachers, and schools at the basic education level.

Among the highlights of the BER 2023 was the announcement made by Duterte related
to the K to 12 Program which added additional years to the country’s 10-year basic
education cycle.

In the BER, Duterte pointed out problems in the current curriculum content --- it
was congested, and some essential learning competencies are missing or misplaced
aside from catering to high cognitive demands.

In its newly-launched agenda, Duterte said that these loopholes in the K to 12

Program will be addressed by making the curriculum “relevant to produce competent,
job-ready, active, and responsible citizens.”

However, the Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) Philippines pointed out that
aside from being “delayed” the curriculum revision as laid out by DepEd also seemed
“misguided.”

“The Philippine government is in fact very late in finalizing its assessment of the
K-12 curriculum and program,” ACT said, noting that the Congress Oversight
Committee also “failed to comply” with the K to 12 Law provision to come up with an
assessment of the program five years from its implementation in 2013.

ACT added that the DepEd has also been talking about its K to 12 review since 2018
but “no document of the comprehensive review has been made available to the public”
to date.

In the BER 2023, VP Duterte said that the revised Kindergarten to Grade 10
curriculum is being “finalized” and the review of the Senior High School (SHS)
curriculum already started.
Areas of concern

In the “MATATAG” agenda, Duterte announced that DepEd will reduce the number of
learning areas in K to 3 from 7 to 5.

This, she said, aims to “focus on foundational skills in literacy and numeracy in
the early grades” --- particularly among disadvantaged learners.

However, ACT said that teachers are “worried” about which subject will be removed
from DepEd’s plan.

Citing previous pronouncements and information that circulate on the ground, ACT
said that the Mother Tongue subject and the MAPEH are the “likely subjects to be
sacrificed.”

ACT maintained that scrapping the Mother Tongue is “counter-productive to learning”

because this serves as a subject that maximizes the home language as an effective
language of instruction.

“MAPEH, on the other hand is crucial in developing the young pupils’ appreciation
of our culture, which is essential in producing ‘batang makabansa’,” ACT pointed
out. The group also pointed out that Music, Arts, PE, and Health are “powerful
tools” in learning and inculcating vital values.

“There are also questions on what will happen to teachers in learning areas that
will be removed, and reasonably, fear of displacement,” ACT said.

In the BER 2023, Duterte mentioned that DepEd will “improve English proficiency
while recognizing linguistic diversity.” This, she said, will entail working
towards the goal of “English language proficiency within the context of a
multilingual nation.”

For ACT, this push to improve English proficiency is also misplaced.

“The education system has been giving premium to the English language since the
public school system was established by the Americans, and look where we are now,”
ACT said.

“A nation with no mastery of any language, even our own, and has low comprehension
and higher level cognitive skills,” it added.

After pointing out that the promise of the K to 12 program to make its graduates
employable “remains a promise,” Duterte said that DepEd will appeal to the industry
and employers to accept students in work immersions and hire them when they
graduate.

ACT, on the other hand, cautioned DepEd on this move because the push to prolong
the work immersion of SHS students only “spell longer experience of exploitation of
our young students by business owners.”

“The education system failed to protect our SHS students against exploitation as
they were made to work for long hours without pay or any allowance under the guise
of the trainee system,” ACT added.

-ABS CBN NEWS

MANILA — The ongoing review of the K to 10 curriculum is "already in the final
stages," the Department of Education (DepEd) spokesperson Atty. Michael Poa said on
Friday.

"We will have a rollout once finalized," he added in a Viber message to ABS-CBN
News.

The review of the K to 10 curriculum started during the previous administration,

while the curriculum review of Grades 11 to 12 or Senior High School began in
November 2022. Consultations with experts are being held to identify which areas
need to be focused on, according to Poa.
He earlier explained the agency's long-term solution to learning loss would be the
revisions to the curriculum of the K to 12 program.

The official said the revisions would help "decongest" the curriculum, allotting
more time to literacy and numeracy, which serve as the foundation of students so
that they would not have a hard time as they advance to the next grade levels.
(We don't want to immediately say that it will be reduced, but we will recalibrate
our curriculum. Because we saw that it is congested, so there are many learning
competencies. So we can really reduce the competencies so that we can really focus
and give time to your core subjects.)-Poa said.

In her Basic Education Report last January, Vice President and Education Secretary
Sara Duterte vowed to "produce competent, job-ready, active, and responsible
citizens" and to "revise the K to 12 curriculum to make them more responsive to our
aspiration as a nation, to develop lifelong learners who are imbued with 21st-
century skills, discipline, and patriotism."