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IF we want to bring quality back into public education, we must
start with the teachers.
There was a time in the Philippines when the
graduates of the public school system were as good as if not better
than those who graduated from the private schools. Public school
grads spoke well, wrote well, and were good in Math, English and
Science. They felt no inferiority complex and were proud of their
education, which earned for them gainful employment (yes even if
they were just high school grads) or qualified them into the nice
colleges, including the state-owned University of the Philippines.
In fact, the older folks among us might remember
the time when those who failed to qualify in the public schools
ended up studying in the private schools, an ignominy that is
somewhat reversed today.
Today, the quality of one’s education is
measured in a lot of ways by the price tag one has paid for it.
Private schools, including the best of them which charge tuition
most Filipinos cannot afford, are able to build the best facilities
and hire above-average teachers. In contrast, most public schools
have poor facilities and have overworked, underpaid and less
qualified teachers who have to teach up 80 students per class in two
batches.
That’s why parents try to do everything they
can to get their kids into private schools, even at the cost of
running into debt, which a lot of them eventually do. The future of
their children seem to depend on it. And in the Philippines, we
believe that the best gift parents can give to their children is a
good education.
It’s a pity then that free, public education
is no longer synonymous to good education. If it were, we’ll have
a lot less harried parents.
Part of the problem—a big part of it—is
funding. Congress simply needs to secure more funding for the public
school system. The Constitution mandates that education be given the
highest budgetary priority, but still we have one of the lowest
allocations for education in the Asean.
If we take a look at the countries that were
once our contemporaries but have gone ahead of us and left us in the
dust economically, we would find out that one thing they did is
increase their spending on education.
The more and better educated our people are the
greater their chances of qualifying for 21st century jobs, thereby
also uplifting our country’s economy.
This glaring fact is manifested in the way
underspending on education has gotten us a lot of unemployed and
underemployed college graduates. We’ve got kids who have earned
college degrees but can’t get jobs because their education is
half-baked. They don’t really have real-world skills for
employment in the jobs that are available.
We need money to improve education. It’s as
simple as that.
That’s why it’s good to know there are
legislators like Sen. Ed Angara who’s well aware of the problem
and is doing something about it.
Angara was chairman of the Congressional
Commission on Education (Edcom). I was a member of Edcom. We
conducted nationwide consultations on the problems of the Philippine
education system and recommended reforms in our report, which has
led Congress to pass laws like R.A. 7722 and R.A. 7796 in 1994
creating the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) and the Technical
Education and Skills Development Authority (Tesda), respectively.
Angara is still at it. Now he wants to raise
teacher salaries. The Senate Committee on Finance which he chairs is
studying the salary adjustments that the administration has
proposed.
He said the new salary-standardization law, in
attempting to place the compensation of public employees on a par
with the private sector, seems to have shortchanged public school
teachers.
“At present, the salary grade [SG] of
entry-level teachers equals those of the lowest-ranking policemen,
both pegged at SG 10, or P12,026 a month. If we include the benefits
they receive, however, entry-level policemen end up getting higher
pay—they receive around P15,000 while teachers get around P14,000.
This is an inequitable distortion within the salary system, since in
terms of qualifications, teachers are equivalent to a first
lieutenant, who are under salary grade 17,” he said.
Angara noted that under the proposed salary
schedule, the position of entry-level teachers will be upgraded from
Salary Grade 10 to Salary Grade 11, and will receive P18,088 a
month, a 50.4-percent increase from their current salary rate.
While this may seem a substantial increase, he
said it is still insufficient to prevent our teachers from leaving
the country.
The Senate Committee on Finance is therefore
proposing to raise the salary grade of teachers to SG 13, which will
increase the salary of teachers to P21,293—up by 77 percent from
the current salary level. This is over and above the benefits that
the Magna Carta for Public School Teachers guarantees.
While a P21,000 salary still pales in comparison
to what our teachers could get abroad, it may be enough to encourage
them to stay and is actually comparable to what first-time teachers
get in private schools.
We definitely need to pay more in order to
encourage the best and the brightest to consider teaching as their
profession and as a vocation that will not bankrupt them. But
Angara’s proposal is a very good start.
ernestboyherrera@yahoo.com
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