The academic year ahead

Academic Year 2010-2011 promises to be the turning point in Philippine education. This year will be marked by major changes in our educational system.

First and most important of all, the new DepEd Secretary will implement President Noynoy Aquino’s campaign promise to add two years to basic education.

These are the exact words of Aquino, as documented in the website of the Liberal Party: “My education team has designed a way to go from our current 10 years (6 elementary, 4 high school) to a K-12 system in five years starting SY 2011-12. Kindergarten (K) to Grade 12 is what the rest of the world gives their children. I will expand the basic education cycle in this country from a short 10-year cycle to a globally-comparable 12 years before the end of the next administration.”

Second, DepEd will revise its curriculum to take into account the added two years. Since the Presidential Task Force to Assess, Plan, and Monitor the Entire Educational System (better known as the Presidential Task Force on Education) has already constructed the “Education Highway,” which includes plans for streaming high school students into either an academic route leading to admission in a Higher Education Institute (HEI) or into a technical-vocational route (Tech-Voc or Polytechnic) leading to employment immediately after high school, all that DepEd has to do is to adopt the subjects in the current General Education Curriculum (GEC) of CHED and the programs of TESDA and incorporate them into the last two years of basic education.

That is the simplest and most cost-effective way of revising the curriculum. Adding a bridge program in elementary school (Grade 7) and another bridge program in high school (5th year) involves starting from zero, not to mention assuming that Grade 6 and Fourth Year will be as bad as they are now. To distinguish the new curriculum from the old Basic Education Curriculum (BEC) and the newer Revised Basic Education Curriculum (RBEC), I suggest naming it the Expanded Basic Education Curriculum (EBEC).

Third, CHED will revise the GEC to take into account the EBEC. The CHED Technical Panel on General Education (which I head) will come up with recommendations on the steps to be taken by CHED in this regard. Crucial to this effort is a consensus among HEIs about what they expect incoming students to already have before they come to college. If we use the Bologna Process terminology, this would constitute an important requirement of the Philippine Qualifications Framework.

Fourth, the new DepEd Secretary and the new CHED Chair can be expected to implement the reforms advocated by the Basic Education Sector Reform Agenda (BESRA), which the education team of Aquino helped craft when they were all still with DepEd and CHED. One of the necessary steps in implementing the recommendations of BESRA is the removal of the bureaucratic and personality-based walls separating the Bureau of Elementary Education, the Bureau of Secondary Education, and CHED.

Fifth, both Senator Edgardo J. Angara and Congressman Salvador H. Escudero III will be back in Congress. They were the prime movers of the Congressional Commission on Education (EDCOM) in 1990. That was 20 years ago, and Sen. Angara has promised that he will convene EDCOM II this year to evaluate what has since happened and to make new recommendations.

Sixth, we might finally be admitted into the Washington Accord. Three things kept us from being approved in the past: the missing two years of basic education, the lack of an accrediting system that involves practicing engineers, and the lack of money. The Philippine Technological Council (PTC) and the Philippine Association of Colleges and Universities Commission on Accreditation (PACUCOA) have signed a MOA including practicing engineers in accreditation teams for engineering programs. The Congressional Commission on Science, Technology and Engineering (COMSTE) has provided money for implementing the reforms demanded by the Washington Accord.

Seventh (this is just a wish on my part, not necessarily on Aquino’s part), we might finally take seriously the Bologna Process. This means that CHED’s Technical Panels should ensure that there will be at least three years of major subjects for all college students. We need to have college degrees that can be recognized by European employers, and these employers will not accept most of our degrees as they are right now, because graduates with these degrees have had only two years of major courses.

Eighth, more of our academic and professional journals will be online through the two sites that I helped found - Philippine Journals Online, currently hosted in Canada and managed in England but soon to be hosted in the USA and managed locally by Asia Pacific College, and Philippine E-Journals, a journal aggregation managed by C&E Publishing and soon to be incorporated in international full-text and bibliographic multidisciplinary journal databases. By being available online to hundreds of thousands of scholars, our journals will be cited more often and our universities (not just the top four), as a consequence, will earn more respectable places in world university rankings.

Just as this coming year heralds a new age in terms of transparent and corruption-free governance, it promises also to be the year when our educational system finally catches up with the rest of the world.