Is the education system still effective despite constantly changing the curriculum?

I was part of one of the last batches under the original Senior High School curriculum, the version DepEd has already begun to revise. Now that I am in college, I look back at those two years with a clearer sense of what they felt like. Work immersion was supposed to be our bridge to the real world. In practice, it mostly felt like a requirement I had to finish rather than a genuine training ground. I showed up, completed the hours, signed the forms, and left.

That was what I quietly realized while I was still in Senior High: the additional two years were never really a training ground. They became just two more years I had to get through—another set of requirements to complete so I could finally move on. I treated Senior High as something to finish, not as something that prepared me. That realization did not come from nowhere. It grew because the system never fully delivered what it claimed the extra years would give.

So when news broke that the President was intensifying immersion programs and introducing a new “Tech-Pro” track to blend technical-vocational training into secondary education, my first reaction was not excitement. It was a question shaped by what I had already experienced: Will it work this time?

That question is no longer just personal. It reflects a larger pattern. The Senior High program has been rewritten three times in a little over a decade. Tracks have been reduced, subjects cut, requirements adjusted, and each time presented as a newly strengthened system. Yet the changes often feel like surface-level fixes. They rearrange what is visible without digging into the deeper problems that keep students from truly learning. A curriculum that keeps shifting never stays still long enough to be properly evaluated. This is what the constant shifting of education feel like—always changing, never settling long enough for anyone to know whether the ground is solid, leaving students adrift.

In his fifth SONA, President Marcos pointed to concrete results. Over 1,500 Senior High graduates were hired on the spot at the Bagong Pilipinas Serbisyo Fairs. He presented these hirings as proof of their market readiness, skills, and capability. He also announced that SHS graduates are now eligible for entry-level government positions. On paper, these sound like clear signs of progress.

But hiring is not the same as preparation. A job fair shows that employers need workers. It does not prove that those workers can read critically, reason independently, or perform the job well once they start. Looking back at my own experience, I still see the same gap. The numbers that measure actual learning tell a different story. According to EDCOM 2, only 0.40 percent of Grade 12 students reached basic proficiency. Those numbers make it difficult to share the optimism heard during the SONA. If only a fraction of students meet basic learning standards, then employability alone cannot be the measure of whether the education system is working.

When job-fair numbers are held up as proof while classroom outcomes remain near zero, the claim begins to unravel. The newest changes are still too recent to evaluate. Yet the previous versions already struggled to deliver the learning outcomes they promised. And because the curriculum keeps shifting, it becomes nearly impossible to know which version is responsible for the failures.

I still think about my batchmates who went straight to work after Grade 12. I do not know if those two years truly prepared them, or if they simply learned how to appear ready long enough to get hired. That uncertainty is the quiet cost of constant reform. Education should not leave every generation wondering whether it was an experiment or a success. Before introducing another curriculum, perhaps the system should first prove that the last one truly worked.

The Frontman