Philippine Basic Education

Former Mason Crest Elementary School principal Brian Butler shared with me an article by Catherine Lough in TES that relates an opinion made by education professor Dylan William. William basically describes the current curriculum in England as designed for the fastest learners such that at the end of the school year, one in five students might be able to digest it while the rest would not. William further characterizes this as logically consistent but immoral. Facing a content-heavy curriculum, there is no more time and space left for either assessment or feedback. As schools have gone into distance learning, this issue becomes even more relevant. Fairfax county, for instance, has continued to send learning packets to its students. Homes have already received five weekly packets. These packets may appear useful at first glance, but without feedback from teachers, all of these may just end up as busy work. With most teachers unable to see any of the work, if children are actually readin...

While some activists are bickering about the removal of Filipino subjects as required courses from higher education and the secretary of education Leonor Briones says "While were picking up on Science and Technology, we should not forget sports, culture, and history", we are totally missing the fact that basic education in the Philippines has recently taken a nosedive because of DepEd's K to 12 curriculum. National Achievement Test scores especially in mathematics and science have dropped drastically to 37.30% and 30.94%, respectively. These scores are not even half the passing score in these tests. The Grade 6 scores should be alarming especially when compared to years prior to the new curriculum. The dramatic drop occurs across all subjects, with marked deterioration in mathematics and science. This shows that the spiral curriculum is not working. When students do not reach grade level in these subjects, the spiral only becomes a "broken spiral". It...

It has been six years since I started commenting on basic education in the Philippines. In that first piece I wrote in the Philippine Star , "First things first: A commentary on K+12", I highlighted the serious challenge introduced by a spiral curriculum in the sciences: " A spiral curriculum in high school will require teachers with knowledge in all these areas at a sufficient level. These required teachers are not going to be available in numbers so this program will be poorly implemented." Fast forward to 2018, we are now hearing from Chemistry teachers in the Philippines. An article recently published in the Australian Journal of Teacher Education  reports, "... teachers revealed their disappointment as they narrated their participation in the spiral progression of chemistry instruction in the K-12 framework that it is not concentrated, extensive, and challenges instruction. Most of the respondents of this study reported how the curriculum does not spiral, ...

I am an alumnus of Manila Science High School. To be admitted to this school, students take an entrance examination and must have a grade of at least 85% in Mathematics, Science, and English subjects, and a grade of at least 83% in all other subjects. Once enrolled, there is a star section in each year. Forty students with the highest grade point average for each class are assigned to these star sections. I was in the star sections of Bohr and Einstein during my last two years of high school. My high school education is an example of both school streaming and class tracking. Entrance is limited to students with above average academic performance thus students with similar academic performance are grouped in one school (school streaming). And within each class, the top students are placed within one classroom (class tracking). These two ways of grouping similar students can indeed benefit instruction in basic education since it allows for lessons to be customized. However, there is...

In " The False Promise and Empty Threat of DepEd's K+12 ", data from countries all over the world are shared to show that "vocational education and training offers no guarantee as a solution to youth unemployment." Worse, a study from China  now suggests that "vocational schooling as a substitute for academic schooling can have detrimental consequences for building human capital in developing countries such as China." Above copied from the World Bank Economic Review  (WBER) DepEd's K to 12 senior high school years are categorized into different tracks. Using projections made by DepEd on the number of teachers required, it is anticipated that a super majority of the students are expected to take the Technology and Livelihood Education (TLE) and Technical-Vocational-Livelihood (TVL) tracks. And within the Academic track, most are expected to take either the Accountancy, Business and Management or the Humanities and the Social Sciences strands,...

Gallup has recently released the results of a survey that seeks reactions of teachers to the Common Core standards. I am not sure how familiar most teachers in the US are to the writings of Finnish educator Pasi Sahlberg but the Gallup findings resonate soundly with what Pasi has to say, for example, in his article " Global Education Reform Is Here ". The following are excerpts: ...the Finnish education system has remained quite uninfected to viruses of what is often called the global education reform movement or GERM... ...Since the 1980s, at least five globally common features of education policies and reform principles have been employed to try to improve the quality of education and fix the apparent problems in public education systems.  First is standardization of education...  A second common feature of GERM is focus on core subjects in school...  The third characteristic that is easily identifiable in global education reforms is the search for low-risk way...

Yes, it is the old debate regarding what a classroom needs to focus on: content versus skills. This debate must really stop because it is a false dichotomy. We need both. The much more important discussion is how one relates to the other so that the time spent by a child inside the classroom becomes much more worthwhile. Paul Cancellieri, a middle school science teacher, wrote the following in TeachHub.com : Above copied from TeachHub.com " Paring down state science standards in favor of more depth and greater comprehension " does not really mean cutting content. Greater depth also means deeper content. Hence, paring down here implies that the old curriculum is a mile wide but only an inch thick. The volume of content is therefore decided not just by the breadth alone but also the depth. Increasing the depth while decreasing the breadth does not necessarily decrease the volume. In fact, it can get bigger, if we make, for instance, the depth 4 times deeper and the breadt...

Last night, my children were watching an episode of Clarence  on CartoonNetwork , "Quill or Crayon". A standardized test was administered and was used to divide a class of students into two groups. Students who scored above average in the test were assigned to the "Quill" group and those who scored below average were placed in the "crayon" group. The "Quill" group was characterized by order and obviously higher academic standards while the "Crayon" group was disorganized and taught by a "not so good" teacher. Jeff, the central character in the show, scored average on the test and was placed in the "Crayon" group. The rest of the episode simply showed the nightmare Jeff had to go through while spending time in the "Crayon" group and, at the same time, continuously longing and insisting to belong instead to the "Quill" group. Click this link to watch this episode There is no argument that how...

Although quite a number of people would be quick to respond, the above question is in fact complex and difficult to answer. There is a tendency to dislike one specific algorithm or way to solve a problem, yet some people unknowingly subscribe to one specific way of teaching children how to do math. Some even go as far as teaching so many ways to do math that not subscribing to this diverse set is now viewed as wrong. Rote learning is frowned upon, but now students need to go through mindless and seemingly endless examples of various ways that learning by drill during my time as a grade school student seems like a walk in the park. For instance, here are five ways to add 47 and 35: Above image copied from Five Ways to Add Multi-digit Whole Numbers

There are various media through which information may be disseminated. Popular press and social media have the widest reach. With regard to very important issues, mass media indeed shoulder a great responsibility. With complicated matters, pundits are necessary to provide expert opinions so that the public could be best informed. Oftentimes, materials that need to be digested by the public are quite voluminous, deep or too complex that the eyes of an expert become indispensable. Reforms are being introduced on education in the US and in the Philippines. Unfortunately, in both cases, the media seem to have failed in informing the public. With a poorly informed public, political strategies are then very much in play. In the Philippines, where politics is still personality based and oligarchic, the media dropping the ball on correctly informing the public about education reforms serves the purpose of keeping everyone in the dark. In the United States, keeping a reform under a low key may ...

The content of a reading comprehension exam is not necessarily covered by a particular curriculum. Passages are usually provided and these are followed by questions that attempt to assess a student's understanding of the material. The exam is basically testing a student's reading skills. Unfortunately, the performance in such an exam is not independent of the student's experiences, background information, and interests. For exams tailored by the teachers themselves, it is only proper that the tests reflect the topics covered inside the classrooms. This is not wrong. One must in fact teach to the test since the test is the content of the subject students are studying. "Teaching to the test" sounds awful to many. It is, if the test is a reading comprehension exam. Topics covered in reading comprehension tests can encompass the various disciplines of science, history, classical and contemporary literature, social studies, music, and the arts. Of course, these are t...

Education does focus on learning of students. Resources, however, introduce additional issues to contend when reforming education. Resources used for teaching are created by people. This creativity comes with a price and a tag "All Rights Reserved": Photo Credit: Compfight

The New Science Standards drafted for US K-12 public schools did not earn high marks from the Fordham Institute. The following figure summarizes where the Institute thinks the new standards stand in comparison with science curricula currently implemented in the various states: http://www.edexcellence.net/publications/final-evaluation-of-NGSS.html

Take for example the two English words "dessert" (something sweet one eats after a meal) and "desert" (an arid land), there is really nothing significantly different in the way these two words are normally written down except for the fact that one word has two s's. However, when correctly pronounced the two words are easily distinguishable. Here lies one difference between oral and written language. Variations in syllable length, loudness and pitch constitute the prosodics of a language. With the Tagalog language, one can cite "mahaba" (long) and mahabag (have mercy). Since the meaning of a word depends on how it is articulated, stressed or intoned, reading accuracy involves correct pronunciation. A recent study published in the Journal of Research in Reading , " The effects of musical training on the decoding skills of German-speaking primary school children " demonstrates that music training helps in reading accuracy:

Pictures do speak louder than words. Here are some photographs shared by Ibaba Elementary School, a school in the town of Paete, Laguna, Philippines. These are photos shared with the public in the Facebook page of the school. Captions are from the original posts. Pagpapadighay, pagpapaligo at pagbibihis sa sanggol...

With the introduction of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in the United States, it may be worthwhile for the Philippines to examine and observe how a new curriculum is implemented. The changes in the United States public school education are not as dramatic as the Philippines DepEd's K to 12. CCSS involves new standards for mathematics and english language arts. On the other hand, the new curriculum in the Philippines includes addition of kindergarten plus two years at the end of high school, mother tongue based - multilingual education, and a spiral curriculum for both math and science. CCSS is therefore so much smaller and yet, the discussions and consultations are wider and deeper in participation. When the draft of CCSS was made public back in March 2010, nearly 10,000 people provided feedback (half were K-12 teachers). And after almost three years, the discussion continues. Recently, the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center, with support from the Hewlett Found...

In evaluating the curriculum for primary schools, it is important to examine what children are in fact doing inside the school. That is why it is useful to look at a child's schedule of classes. This goes far beyond the sound bites we hear from education policy makers or reformers. The class schedule showing the time allotment for each subject is highly informative, providing a dimension one does not see by simply browsing through a list of content standards or a curriculum.  From " Recess as a Favorite Subject May Sound Funny, But Seriously, It Is Important ":  With the oral fluency in English added in the second half of the year, the total instructional time per day is 240 minutes or 4 hours. This information can then be combined with the following schedule found in schools that employ triple shifts: It's shortly after dawn, but the youngest pupils in overcrowded Ilugin Elementary School in Pasig City are already in class. Ilugin's grade one students ar...

Science teaches in so many ways. Research informs. With the findings provided by neuroscience research, the question is how to apply these studies to improve learning. Dr. Mariale Hardiman, co-founder and director of the Johns Hopkins University School of Education's Neuro-Education Initiative , has been working over the past decade to connect brain research with effective teaching. Her model is called " Brain-Targeted Teaching:®  A Comprehensive Model for Classroom Instruction and School Reform ", illustrated in the following figure: Above figure downloaded from  http://braintargetedteaching.org/index.cfm To help explain the above six targets, several examples of lessons have been provided by Hardiman on the BrainTargetedTeaching  website . One example is for first grade students, submitted by Alysson Eno, " Where We Are in Place and Time ".  Lesson: Different Landforms Figure downloaded from  Where We Are in Place and Time Presentation...