Are K-12 students overworked—by design?

“Overworked” is such a loaded term so it’s important to proceed carefully. Academic workload is the sum of time spent in class for instruction, as well as time spent on homework. There is no official global standard for it, but we know that academic workload cannot be increased indefinitely.

At some point, the cognitive and physical limits of students will be reached, and pushing them too hard for too long could mean sleep deficit, anxiety, disengagement, and eventually burnout.

What we have as guides are international benchmarks and recommendations. Looking purely at instructional time, we have figures from Benavot (2004) citing 750 hours per year for Grades 1 to 4, rising to 850 hours per year for Grades 5 to 8. François Testu, a professor emeritus of cognitive psychology in France, recommended the following limits based on “chronobiological” and “chrono-psychological” studies: 20 to 25 hours per week for elementary students; 25 to 28 for junior high, and 31 for senior high.

Closer to home, we can look at the figures for the minimum weekly instruction time of our Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) neighbors. In Vietnam (similar per capita income, yet with outsized scores in the Programme for International Student Assessment, or Pisa), they range from roughly 22 hours per week in Grades 1 and 2, peaking at just over 25 hours in Grades 8 and 9.

If the Department of Education’s (DepEd) prescribed instruction times per grade level consistently exceed global or Asean benchmarks, we can reasonably infer not just overwork, but overwork “by design,” as these are minimum contact hours.

In a small research study for the Second Congressional Commission on Education (EdCom II), Maria Fe Carmen Dabbay and I looked through three decades’ worth of DepEd memoranda covering three versions of our basic education curriculum: the National Elementary School/Secondary Education Curriculum from the 1990s, the Basic Education Curriculum from 2002, and the K-12 curriculum from 2012. What’s relevant for us today are the current prescribed minimum hours of instruction under the K-12 curriculum.

Here is what we found: whether compared with Testu’s recommendations or regulations in Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia, elementary and secondary students in the Philippines consistently spend more time in class than their Asean counterparts. They appear “overworked by design,” but not uniformly so. Grade 1 isn’t so bad; an extra hour per week. For Grades 2 to 10 it’s an extra three hours to 5.5 hours per week. The worst is in Grade 3—nine more hours per week compared to Testu’s benchmark, and 7.5 more compared to Vietnamese standards. These estimates are conservative on two counts—since they are prescribed minimums, we expect that many schools—if not most—exceed them.

We have Pisa data on actual instruction time experienced by junior high schoolers. In the Philippines, actual Grade 10 instruction time exceeds the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s average by about nine hours per week. Our estimates also do not include time spent on homework, for which no explicit limits are set, only guidance via a 2010 DepEd memorandum advising a “reasonable amount during weekdays” and a homework ban on weekends.

Efforts to decongest our Basic Education curricula are laudable, but must ultimately result in classroom hours per week that more closely match international benchmarks, especially in levels where the overwork is currently most pronounced: Grades 3, 7, 10, and senior high school. We hope that these would prompt second thoughts about the desirability of schools exceeding minimum standards for classroom time, as this exacts a cost on students. Matching international standards could also lead to a more efficient use of limited instructional hours.

We hope our education authorities would support larger-scale data collection on academic workload. For over a decade now, teachers have been encouraged to adopt more competency-based methods of assessment: exhibits, videos, demonstrations, etc. But the more complex the output, the more likely the planning fallacy holds. We’re all pretty bad at estimating the amount of time needed to complete a project, so we need good data to rationalize student workloads. Because if you must know, overwork by design seems even more egregious in college. But that’s for another telling.

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Dr. Gerardo L. Largoza is De La Salle University’s executive director for strategic management and quality assurance, and an associate professor at its Carlos L. Tiu School of Economics. He is one of the research fellows commissioned by EdCom II to conduct studies to evaluate the state of the Philippine education system.