Philippine Basic Education

My spouse and I have spent the largest fraction of our lives in this community called Annandale. Last night, my wife help organized a march. In the words of another resident, James Albright: "First protest I have ever known of in Annandale. Hundreds upon hundreds protesting in front of Mason District police station". We did not expect a very large crowd, yet hundreds of families from Annandale came, which actually made social distancing very challenging. It started with a march along Columbia Pike from Barcroft Center to the Mason District Police Station. Inside the parking lot of the police station, people knelt in silence for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, the same amount of time a police officer knelt on George Floyd during his final moments. Afterwards, the people, adults and children, of Annandale spoke up. Names of African Americans brutally killed by the police were read by the son of Ricardy Anderson, Mason District representative to the Fairfax County School Board. ...

"If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck." In education, we do not seem to follow this simple rule. We can never address the problem of inequity in education if we continue with practices that undermine fairness. We can pretend as much as we want that we are advocating for education for all but our practices remain the single loudest testament to what we actually embrace. In education, there are gaps in achievement and excellence based on family income or race. Everyone can see this. What we often fail to see is that we insist with programs that are clearly discriminatory. The Advanced Academic Program in my county is a glaring example. Compared to all students, children from low income families (Those who qualify for free or reduced meals (FRM)) are three times less likely to be enrolled in levels 3 and 4 of the Advanced Academic Program (AAP) in Fairfax county. The likelihood of either a Black or a Hispanic chil...

Like Ricardy Anderson (Democratic nominee for school board from the Mason District), I have a child enrolled in Advanced Academic Program Level IV. Similarly, I also have chosen to keep my child in the same school instead of transferring her to a designated school for advanced academics. Keeping a child in the same school does look like preventing segregation but as Whitney L. Pirtle, a sociologist and professor at the University of California Merced,     recently notes on the  Atlantic , "The public focuses its attention on divides between schools, while tracking has created separate and unequal education systems within single schools." Above copied from The Atlantic As parents, we do want the best for our children. But we must make this desire apply to all children, not just ours. Pirtle ends her article with both sadness and honesty, "While my individual actions and choices are important, their impact is limited. Until we can develop better admissions tests...

In some school districts in the United States, students are provided the choice between different curricula in high school. Some students, for instance, are given the opportunity to enroll in advanced classes in math and the sciences. Obviously, the presence of more academically rigorous tracks means a stratification within a school. Taking an advanced course can essentially lead to a greater opportunity to learn in the years to come when the advanced course serves as a preparatory stage for future courses. These future opportunities afforded by advanced courses taken in high school can translate to better college preparation and success later in a career. Limiting the enrollment to these advanced courses based on prior performance or achievement basically denies the opportunity and exposure to students who fail to meet a given threshold. This is an example of inequity in basic education. And there is plenty of evidence that students of low socio-economic status as well as minority gro...

If you are renovating a home, you would not pay a contractor if the work does not yield good results. If you are on a drug regimen, you will not be advised to continue with the same course, if positive outcomes are not observed. Ingrid McCarthy at  STEM Sells   has some highly inspirational words to share: "We can't keep doing things the same way and expect different results." Yet in the field of education, we seem unable to apply the same principle as we stubbornly cling onto schemes that simply do not work. One good example is gifted education. It is widely known that enrollment in gifted, talented or advanced academic programs has gross underrepresentation of the poor and certain minority children. This underrepresentation, of course, mirrors the well known academic achievement gap associated with poverty and race. This is only expected since there is really no other way but to look at achievement when screening for gifted students. What will be surprising is if ...

"Without examining our theories and thinking, focusing on policy and resource issues will do little to change the reality of learning inequality."  This is indeed a profound statement of Anthony Muhammad in the preface of his book Overcoming the Achievement Gap Trap: Liberating Mindsets to Effective Change . And I find advanced academic programs as one of the best areas in basic education where Muhammad's words must be heard and seriously considered. It is a fact that minorities and low-income children continue to be underrepresented in these programs, yet we persist in finding ways to alleviate the problem without addressing the heart of the matter: Our continued belief that there are always children who are exceptionally superior in intelligence compared to their peers in a classroom. With this mindset, we then device screening schemes through which we can identify these children early on. And when we find our selection is biased towards socioeconomic status or race,...

Back in 2009, Tom Loveless  of the conservative Fordham Institute warned against the detracking of schools in Massachusetts. He suggested that tracking (grouping students according to abilities) leads to higher achievement since advanced students are given wider opportunities and greater challenges. Loveless, in his article, was specifically referring to the public schools in the state of Massachusetts, where detracking has become widespread in middle schools. Fast forward, ten years later, the state of Massachusetts has received the honor of being number one in the nation in terms of K-12 achievement, scoring high on all criteria: current performance, improvement throughout the past 15 years, and in addressing the poverty achievement gap. Excellence and equity can indeed be realized at the same time. Above copied from  EdWeek Massachusetts in the only state in the United States that scored a grade of B+. New Jersey gets a B and Virginia gets a B-. These are the only...

Meritocracy is often used in education for some perceived efficiency. Sadly, part of that efficiency entails a selection process that provides society with laborers of differentiated skills. Not everyone can be a CEO. The Philippines' K to 12 has a tracking program in senior high school and during my basic education years, students are divided into sections based on their past performance. Obviously, there is a question of efficiency versus equity. If schools only focus on how much their students actually learn, there is no question that equity beats efficiency. As standardized exams show, "High- and low-poverty classes that used ability-based reading groups “almost always” scored lower on average than those that used them “hardly ever” on the 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress." Above copied from EdWeek The problem with selection or "tracking" in schools is this. We are biased whether we admit it or not. A recent experiment involving psych...

With the new K to 12 curriculum in the Philippines, various tracks are now offered in the last two years of basic education. The various options available obviously make it possible for students to find themselves later unprepared for the courses they decide to take in college. A student, for instance, who finishes the accounting business management (ABM) strand in the senior high school academic track, is now required to take additional courses if the student chooses to enroll in a Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) major in college. These additional courses which are now called "bridging programs" are either taken during the first year of college or over several weeks in the summer before college starts. Above copied from  Coldwater High School Early College Program There are bridging programs in the United States, but these are different from the ones that are now appearing in colleges in the Philippines. In Coldwater High School in Michigan, fo...

"The K to 12 basic education curriculum will be sufficient to prepare students for work." This is one of the promises of the Philippine DepEd K to 12 curriculum . With assumed school-industry partnerships, the techvoc tracks of the senior high school are expected "to allow students gain work experience while studying and offer the opportunity to be absorbed by the companies". Focusing on a school-work transition in high school may indeed yield employment benefits in the short-term, but sacrificing general education may also lead to a very early specialization that can easily hinder adaptability and therefore decrease employment in later life. With a rapidly changing job market, skills specific to a given occupation can become obsolete. Thus, vocational education in high school may be beneficial right away, but disadvantageous in the long term. Determining the effects of either a vocational or general education on employment is not straightforward since tracking in...