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By Maila Ager, Correspondent
Last summer, close to 22,000 public school
teachers became students once again as part of the Department of
Education’s program to improve the quality of instruction in the
elementary and high school levels.
Under the program, 20,960 teachers took
refresher courses and 1,045 were given scholarship grants in such
subjects as English, Mathematics, Science and Makabayan.
Ideally, 30,000 teachers more should have taken
the summer classes. But, according to Education Undersecretary
Miguel Luz, budget considerations came into play.
“We should send back [for training] at least
10 percent [of the country’s 470,000 public school teachers] every
summer. But if we send 50,000 teachers back to school every summer,
we will be spending about P500 million to P600 million, which we
don’t have,” Luz said.
The education department felt the pressure to
upgrade the teachers’ skills after President Arroyo issued a
directive to use English again as a medium of instruction in
schools.
Diagnostic tests administered to teachers who
went through summer training reinforced the need to hone their
English skills. The tests showed that the teachers scored 84 percent
on sentence structure, 71 percent on reading and only 64 percent
scored on written expression.
Undersecretary Fe Hidalgo, in charge of the
education department’s curriculum and program, said that overall
the test results were “good.” “They tell us that what they
need more perhaps is to improve their written expression. But
that’s not bad.”
To check on the teachers’ English proficiency,
the department will look into how good they are in lesson plan
presentation, communicative competence, discussion skills as well as
the art of questioning.
In school, Hidalgo said, teachers must speak
English at all times, even in ordinary conversation, and most
particularly during English, Mathematics and Science classes.
She, however, is against the collection of fines
for students caught not speaking English in school. “It might turn
off some of the students who are lukewarm to schooling and they
might altogether drop out if it’s done,” Hidalgo said.
Instead, the total time for English as a subject
in elementary levels will be increased from 40 minutes to an hour.
Luz, on the other hand, is more concerned about
the influx of “nonqualified” teachers in the public school
system, especially those teaching Science.
It is not uncommon for schools where there are
not enough Science instructors to ask teachers with other
specializations to teach the subject.
“If you have no Chemistry major, that
doesn’t mean you can’t teach chemistry. You have to teach it. So
what they are doing is they would just give a Math or English
teacher a textbook. He can now teach Chemistry,” Luz said.
All told, the biggest problem is not quality but
quantity. Luz said there simply are not enough teachers to handle
the ever-increasing number of enrollees.
This year, 17 million elementary and high school
students are going to school. In high school alone the increase in
the student population is almost 8 percent, owing mainly to the big
number of transferees from private schools.
That put the teacher shortage to about 40,000,
Luz said.
“We build our classrooms because we were
expecting the secondary level to grow at two-and-a-half to three
percent. But if it’s growing at 8 percent, that means that the
number of transferees coming into the public school system has
doubled,” he said.
The education department is still looking at the
national average of one teacher for every 36 elementary pupils and 1
teacher for every 44 high school students. The ratio will more
likely be 1:70 in congested areas and cities like Metro Manila and
some parts of Cagayan de Oro City.
To address the problem of large class sizes,
some schools were allowed to hold two batches of classes a day, one
in the morning and the second in the afternoon or evening.
Hidalgo acknowledged it is not safe for pupils
and students to go home late, but she said this is the only
available option to accommodate the growing student population in
public schools.
Teachers from less-critical areas could be
reassigned to problem districts, but this could be a violation of
the Magna Carta of Teachers, which says that they should be assigned
in the areas where they live, Hidalgo said.
“If you ask a teacher from Batanes to go to
Manila, that’s a different story. You should really ask the
permission of the teacher. This redeployment is really a problem,”
Hidalgo said.
Luz hopes the department might convince the
teachers to consider a reassignment as an option.
“We are studying [if we could tinker with the
Magna Carta] and what we want to do is talk to the teachers’
associations to help,” he said.
If the redeployment scheme is approved, then the
department need not ask for more teachers.
Luz said the teacher shortage could also be
addressed by immediately replacing about 9,000 instructors who are
retiring this year.
“You can get by with shortages in classrooms,
desks or textbooks. It is difficult but you can still learn. But you
cannot definitely learn if we don’t have teachers,” Luz said.
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