IT WOULD be World Teachers’ Day this Oct. 5. We can’t help but recall the recent national elections when teachers showed unparalleled honor and integrity. In fact, they serve every election to secure the sanctity of votes. They facilitate and safeguard our democratic exercise of choosing our next leaders.
But in the study titled “Pressures on Public School Teachers and Implications on Quality”, state think tank Philippine Institute for Development cautioned that actual teaching is increasingly being sidelined by the multitude of other responsibilities and roles that teachers play, which, in turn can erode teaching quality. It would therefore be wise for the Department of Education (DepEd) to review its policy concerning public school teachers’ workload, particularly those concerning administrative and other duties unrelated to teaching.
Under the Magna Carta for Public School Teachers, teachers are to devote up to six hours of actual teaching per day. On top of this, teachers are given administrative or student support roles which include, among others, paperwork on seminars and training workshops they are required to attend, as well as tasks related to student guidance, budget, disaster response, and health. Teachers are likewise expected to participate in various government programs such as mass immunization, community mapping, conditional cash transfer, deworming, feeding, population census, antidrug, and yes, elections.
Most private schools employ administrative staff to do enrollment, registration, records, daily operations, and janitorial services while public school teachers have insufficient support and administrative staff.
Attending multiple trainings and seminars — with topic areas spanning from technical writing to activities related to disaster risk reduction and management — are also time-consuming for teachers. Training is supposed to address gaps in skills and competencies. But while various international and nongovernment organizations want to offer trainings, it is unclear if DepEd has a system for rationalizing and systematizing teacher trainings.
The net effect of all these is distracting teachers from their core function of effective teaching. And this is sad to say the least.
DepEd should look into its human resource shortages and ask support from the Department of Budget and Management in hiring additional administrative staff. These posts will fill in for administrative tasks such as registration and records keeping, secretarial work for the principal’s office, financial reporting, guidance counselling, and other assignments that are normally distributed among regular teaching faculty.
