EDUCATION Secretary Sonny Angara has announced that the Matatag curriculum will be amended, based on the feedback from teachers and students on “what needs to be changed [and] what can be improved.”
“Whatever the learnings are for that first year, the process is iterative, meaning we are willing to change as we go along, as we learn from the experience on the ground,” Angara said.
He said the revised curriculum was a product of several years of study. The curriculum was launched under his predecessor, Vice President Sara Duterte, in August 2023 to improve the quality of basic education.
This decongested basic education program emphasizes foundational skills in literacy, numeracy and socio-emotional development during children’s early education years. It also integrates lessons on good manners and right conduct, values education, and peace education, and emphasizes 21st-century skills.
The curriculum has seven competencies: mother tongue, Filipino, English, mathematics, Araling Panlipunan (social studies), MAPEH (music, arts, physical education and health) and Edukasyon sa Pagpapakatao (values education).
In a meeting of the Second Congressional Commission on Education (Edcom 2) subcommittee on basic education at the University of the Philippines in Bonifacio Global City on June 11, 2024, the Department of Education (DepEd) and the Philippine Institute of Development Studies also presented their assessments on the Matatag K-to-10 pilot implementation.
The curriculum was implemented in 35 pilot schools (out of 47,678 schools), distributed across 13 divisions in seven regions. The DepEd reported that as of May 24, 2024, 267,900 teachers and personnel were trained for the curriculum’s implementation.
Preliminary findings show that the curriculum appears to be generally well-accepted in the pilot areas. While the new curriculum improves teacher instruction, it also has no apparent impact on hours of work and selected measures of well-being.
The same findings also suggest there is no statistical difference in the expected percentage of competencies covered in the pilot schools as against nonpilot ones.
Edcom 2 also called on the DepEd to be guided by the findings of the monitoring and evaluation team.
“Matatag claims to be a decongested curriculum. We need to make sure that the competencies are actually reduced and streamlined, and not just compressed in a broader category,” said Sen. Koko Pimentel, Edcom 2 commissioner and co-chairman of the Edcom 2 standing committee on basic education.
He hit the nail on the head. We should aim for depth and not just the breadth of treatment in our curriculum. A few topics covered well in Araling Panlipunan is better than a long list of topics discussed at surface level. For example, this subject matter can dwell on the idea of heroism through the years, studying Lapu-Lapu, Jose Rizal, Andres Bonifacio, Jose Abad Santos of World War II and Macliing Dulag during the martial law years.
Moreover, the Matatag curriculum needs teachers who have been trained for the subjects they are assigned to teach. Complaints have been made of Filipino teachers assigned to the National Mathematics Program (NMP) of the curriculum.
The curriculum has two additional programs, the NMP and the National Reading Program (NRP), which are supposed to be done for four days for 30 minutes each.
For the curriculum’s first phase, the education department had about a year since the launch to prepare. However, it only released the order containing the implementation guidelines on July 23, less than a week before classes open in around 47,000 public schools nationwide. Thus, school administrators were not able to review and implement changes in the teaching workload because of the tight schedule. The workload had already been determined and distributed by then.
DepEd Order 10 states that NMP and NRP facilitators should “demonstrate mastery of the subject matter or in their specialization across the curriculum.” Therefore, NMP facilitators should be math teachers and NRP facilitators should be either English or Filipino teachers.
This experience does not appear to be isolated. Teachers’ Dignity Coalition Chairman Benjo Basas said his group also received complaints from teachers on the “chaotic” rollout of the Matatag curriculum.
“The implementation of a new curriculum is a lengthy process, especially when considering the workload of teachers,” he said.
Aside from the foregoing, we also recommend buying more textbooks, the use of hybrid learning systems, raising teachers’ salaries and having an ideal ratio of one teacher for every 25 students. These are the only ways we can improve the dismal situation in our schools.