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By Jonathan M. Hicap, Reporter
A group of public teachers are
wary of the Department of Education’s new policy favoring
technical-vocational courses for high-school graduates, saying it
only encourages the marketing of Filipino workers for jobs abroad.
“We object to the DepEd’s
renewed focus on voc-tech insofar as it is tied to the Arroyo
administration’s labor export policy. Instead of focusing on
creating jobs in our own country, government aggressively promotes
the marketing of workers overseas,” said Chairman Antonio Tinio of
the Alliance of Concerned Teachers.
Education Secretary Jesli Lapus
has advised the graduates to enroll in tech-voc after their scores
in the National Career Assessment Examination showed they are more
inclined to enroll in tech-voc courses than in pursuing college
education.
In the General Scholastic
Aptitude part of the test that measured readiness of students for
college, only 3.7 percent, or a mere 49,066 students of the 1.3
million examinees, garnered passing scores of 75 percent and above.
Tinio said, “The poor
performance of students in the General Scholastic Aptitude [GSA]
portion of the test is consistent with the results of other tests
[diagnostic and achievement] that the DepEd gives to students,
reflecting the poor quality of education our schools are able to
provide.”
Lapus blamed past administrations
for the students’ poor performance in the GSA.
“As we have been saying for so
long, the inability of government in the past decades to cope with
the huge resource demands of a growing student population has placed
us on a catch-up mode,” he said in a statement.
Lapus reiterated that there are a
lot of opportunities for tech-voc graduates in the labor market.
But ACT sees it in a different
light. Tinio said tech-voc is designed to provide students with
skills required by the foreign labor market.
“Government is the biggest
employment agency for jobs abroad; through the NCAE, the DepEd is
marketing tech-voc to students,” he said.
Tinio said even going to college
or enrolling in tech-voc courses are not within the reach of
today’s youth because of poverty and lack of government support.
“In reality, [roughly] less
than 25 percent of the 1.3 million public-school students who took
the NCAE will actually go to college. The majority of Filipino youth
don’t get to finish high school. Post-basic education, whether
college or voc-tech, is beyond the reach of most Filipino youth. The
main factors here are poverty and lack of government support. It
will take more than a test and exhortations by the DepEd secretary
to change these facts,” he said.
Tinio said in order to raise
students’ performance, the government should increase public
spending on education, raise teachers’ salaries, reduce class
sizes and provide better training to teachers.
“What is lacking is political
will to implement these changes,” Tinio said.
He said the DepEd should leave
tech-voc education to the Technical Education and Skills Development
Authority and focus on delivering quality basic education.
“We want to see dramatic
reduction in dropout rates and we want to see more youths finishing
high school,” Tinio said.
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