WHEN Congress starts reviewing the K – 12 program, it must strive to answer this important question in everybody’s mind: Are senior high school graduates getting hired, becomes self-employed, or putting up their own businesses?
If yes, we want empirical, verifiable evidence showing how many, who, why, how, where, and when?
In other words, facts and metrics.
If they are not, we also want evidence and analysis, so Congress can arrive at a sound decision on the fate of the program.
According to industry leaders, 80 hours of work immersion is only about two weeks of work. Eighty hours are not enough for a senior high school student to learn what they should about work. Perhaps the minimum OJT time should at least be two months or eight weeks? That’s 320 hours or one summer term.
Also, DepEd already faces budget constraints impacting on the availability of classrooms, textbooks, and modules. The myriad of non-teaching tasks takes away teachers’ focus on their real role and place in the classroom. Unloading public school teachers of the many administrative tasks, school programs, non-curricular contests, social work duties, and off-campus meetings would enable them to focus on their main classroom role. What mostly happens is that teachers do overtime work or bring the work at home.
Perhaps DepEd should also be required to come up with a reform plan that will deploy all the excess and redundant personnel down to the schools so that there will be more teachers teaching in the classrooms than in DepEd offices.
The House review of K – 12 is not meant to be a witch hunt. It must help identify, determine and solve those problems that adversely affect the effectiveness and readiness of teachers to implement K to 12. Or even scrap the program if need be.
