K+12, ready or not

A lot of time was devoted to discussions on the implementation of K+12 – the program that makes kindergarten and Grade 7 free and compulsory in public schools.

Now that K+12 is being implemented nationwide for the first time, it would be better to take a break from sniping and see how it can be a success.

With children from affluent families starting kiddie/prep school at the tender age of two, I’m sure there were many parents, before K+12, who also wanted their children to go through kindergarten but were too poor to afford it. Before K+12, I knew minimum wage earners who saved their hard-earned money to send their children to kindergarten in private schools.

Average tuition in the more affordable schools was P1,500 per semester, with P250 collected for examinations. Why pay for exams? The parents didn’t know. The exam fee could be paid on credit, but all bills had to be settled before the kids’ final grades were released.

I knew several parents who couldn’t afford even a minimal monthly tuition of P100 charged by certain kindergarten schools.

Now that the government has started free kindergarten, it would be tough for any administration to return to the days before K+12. This scheme is sure to outlast the presidency of Noynoy Aquino.

Those aspiring to succeed P-Noy in 2016 should also want to see the quality of Philippine education improve long before the turnover of power. A well-educated workforce is the best asset of any country.

With the launch of K+12, what we can do is identify the glitches and see how these can corrected.

The glitches are sure to be similar to the problems that continue to plague the public education system: an acute lack of teachers and all school facilities and supplies, from classrooms to desks and textbooks. Computers as education tools? Forget it. In schools blessed with several computers, there aren’t enough teachers trained to use them.

You saw the images on the first day of the current school year: classes being held along school stairways and aisles because of congestion. At least there seemed to be no reports this year of classes held under the shade of trees, but that was probably because of bad weather.

That story about Anabelle Balaswit and her son Lou being classmates in Grade 3 at the Buyagan Elementary School in Benguet was touching, but unique only in the willingness of the 36-year-old mother of three to join her son in third grade.

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Studies have shown that the dropout rate in the country’s elementary schools remains high. The reason for Balaswit’s failure to obtain formal education when she was of school age is also common: her farmer parents did not believe in education.

I’ve also met teenagers and young adults who told me they dropped out early in grade school because they couldn’t understand their lessons and they didn’t think they were learning much anyway.

After learning basic reading, writing and arithmetic, these kids drop out of school and go along with their parents’ belief that children can be more useful helping out in the farm or in other sources of family income.

This idea is reinforced by circumstances: millions of families are too poor to pay for uniforms, transportation fare, allowances and the numerous miscellaneous fees collected throughout the year in public schools where tuition is free.

This perception of education seems to be strong particularly among farming families, where there is a choice for school-age children between getting formal education or helping in the family’s livelihood source and day-to-day survival.

It’s another reason why making land reform work and assisting farmers should be a priority for P-Noy, no matter how personally distasteful the task might have become after that nasty Supreme Court gave away Hacienda Luisita to its tenants.

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Sugarcane and rice farmers aren’t the only ones who need assistance. There are also an estimated 3.4 million coconut farmers and their families in about 21,000 coconut growing barangays, according to Oscar F. Santos of the PEACE Foundation. He wrote that according to the National Anti-Poverty Commission, those coconut farmers and their families are now the “poorest of the poor and the most socially insecure sector of society.” Santos has been working with farmers who are still engaged in litigation over the Marcos-era coconut levy fund.

P-Noy can say that the coconut levy controversy is up to the courts to resolve. But his government can provide many forms of assistance to all small-scale farmers and their families.

The Philippines remains an agricultural country. Agriculture often comes second only to remittances from overseas Filipino workers in the annual GDP pie.

But Philippine agriculture clearly has a wide room for growth. Thailand has sprinted ahead of us in this sector, and Vietnam is rapidly doing the same.

Crop rotation, assistance in new agricultural methods that can increase yields, support in marketing, access to post-harvest facilities and better roads – the government knows what small-scale farmers need. They can be assisted in setting up cooperatives, to enjoy the advantages of large-scale agribusiness estates. The more successful agricultural operations can be trained in farm tourism – a growing market in the global travel and tourism industry.

P-Noy has only four years left to make a difference in the lives of the country’s most impoverished sectors.

For him, a modest, workable objective should be to create an environment that will make farmers earn enough to keep their children in school at least until they complete K+12.