Global Voices

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The world is talking, are you listening?

“We call it officially ‘K to 12’ not ‘K+12’.”

This is what Department of Education Secretary Armin Luistro said while explaining the department’s preference for “K to 12” to refer to DepEd’s flagship “Enhanced K to 12 Basic Education Program.”

While there are several variations of the 12-year basic education model used abroad with different names such as “K-12”, “K+12”, and “K12”, Luistro said that the DepEd Steering Committee preferred the use of “K to 12” as it “captures the fact that not all features are new.”

He said that “K+12” may “mislead people that it’s only 12 years and not a total of 13.”
The term “K-12”, on the other hand, is not also used because “it sometimes read wrongly as ‘K minus 12’,” said Luistro. (http://www.mb.com.ph/articles/358626/deped-it-s-k-to-12)

K to 12, K-12 or K+12…. What does matter? Should the public be simply debating the name of the curriculum or should we not dissect it to find its elements and weigh each one to see if these changes are indeed justified. Discussions or debates on the new curriculum have narrowly focused on the two additional years at the end of high school. The first of these two additional years will not happen until 2016. In the meantime, several elements will, this coming June. The article below examines these elements and demonstrates that most of these were not based on data.

http://philbasiceducation.blogspot.com/2012/04/first-things-first-commentary-on-k-12.html