When everything changes at once

The new school year opened Monday, and with it came not one reform but a whole stack of them. A three-term calendar replacing the old four quarters; a tougher grading system; a slimmed-down senior high curriculum; and a new lesson-planning framework with the tidy acronym ILAW.

Any one of these would strain a system that serves 26 million learners and roughly 900,000 teachers. DepEd chose to launch them all in the same June, and that is the part worth mulling on.

The Alliance of Concerned Teachers saw it coming and said so, repeatedly, since March. The group disputed DepEd’s claim that the calendar went through broad consultation, arguing that most teachers were blindsided by an orientation cascade that was never the same thing as being asked. Several teachers’ organizations pushed a modest request: pilot-test the three-term calendar first, in a few divisions, before staking the whole country on it.

DepEd declined as it ran orientations instead and pledged to fix problems as they appear — to use feedback from schools to sort out the kinks mid-flight. Build the plane while flying it, essentially.

What makes the gamble odd is that DepEd already believes in piloting. It did exactly that with the strengthened senior high curriculum – 55 schools across Aklan, Antique, Capiz, Guimaras, Iloilo, and Roxas tried it in 2025 before the national rollout. The department clearly grasps the worth of a controlled test. It simply declined to run one for the calendar, the reform that rewires every class record, report card, and division template in the system. As one education researcher noted in a newspaper column, every official form was built around four quarters; rebuild them all at once and you are courting errors across 45,000 schools.

None of this makes the three-term calendar a bad idea. Longer, less-interrupted terms might genuinely help. The pandemic learning losses are real, and the ARAL recovery program needs space to work. The quarrel is with the sequencing, not the destination.

What would have been smarter – and still could be salvaged – is staggering. Hold the calendar steady this year, defer the grading overhaul and the new planning framework, and watch what the data says. Put up a public dashboard, term by term, so parents and teachers can see plainly what is breaking and what is holding. And when something does break, resist the old habit ACT chairperson Ruby Bernardo named: “When policies fail, who gets blamed? It is the teachers.” If the department insists on changing everything at once, then the department owns the fallout, not the homeroom.

Reforms rarely die from bad ideas. They die from bad timing. DepEd now has one school year to prove this was the exception.