Angara backs K to 12 review to cure learning skills ‘crisis’

TO reap the demographic dividend from the Philippines’ young population, educational reforms that substantially improve their “skills and learning” are crucial if the country is to recover from the pandemic’s impact and post sustained growth and development, according to Sen. Juan Edgardo Angara.

Those reforms must include the review of the K to 12, to which the incoming president and vice president have indicated openness, Angara said, even as he confirmed that such review could be part of implementing the law creating the Education Commission-2 or

Edcom 2, a bill passed by the 18th Congress but awaiting President Duterte’s signature.

“Any K12 review can proceed alongside the proposed Edcom2, which Congress has passed,” Angara said in an SMS reply to the Businessmirror, which asked him if he backs calls for Duterte to sign the Edcom measure before he steps down on June 20.

Both the K to 12 review and Edcom-2, said Angara, “seek to reform Philippine basic education and it’s important when we reform K-12 we see it as a component part of the whole education system as well as the economy as a whole.”

Angara added: “We have a young population that is in need of skills and learning and despite the passage of UAQTEA or the free college law many still do not make it that far,” referring to the dismally low cohort survival rate for Filipino students who make it all the way to tertiary school from basic education levels.

“Which is why improving K12 is crucial for our young people,” Angara stressed.

President-elect Ferdinand “Bongbong” R. Marcos Jr. and Vice President-elect Sara Duterte, to whom he assigned the Education portfolio, earlier, both signaled intent to review the K to 12 law.

Calls for the K to 12 review have mounted especially during the pandemic, when, according to most assessments, the lockdowns and limited classroom interactions have adversely affected learning and productivity. This so-called “learning crisis” has fueled fears among business leaders that the next generation of workers will be ill-equipped to take on the jobs that will be in demand or necessary as the whole moves into a post-pandemic era.

Angara, meanwhile, did not reply to a query from the Businessmirror on whether he planned to press or ask President Duterte to sign the Edcom-2 bill which Congress passed, and is now pending at his desk, since Edcom’s tasks will include a review of K to 12 anyway.

Any enrolled bill from Congress, if unacted upon by the President, automatically lapses into law within 30 days after it is received by the President if he fails to act on it either by approving or vetoing it.