TEACHERS’ honor and integrity are unparalleled, hence their crucial role every election. They serve during elections to secure the sanctity of votes. This midterm elections they will continue to be vanguards of people’s votes despite the precariousness of such duty. They will continue to facilitate and safeguard our democratic exercise of choosing our next leaders.
But 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.
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.
Why not accept undergraduate students pursuing primary and secondary education programs to assist in administrative tasks as part of their on-the-job training? Another way to reduce the workload of teachers is to hire qualified full-time counselors capable of providing real support for students with disciplinary and attitudinal issues and those who have been victims of trauma and abuse. Under DepEd’s current staffing standard, all schools are required to hire one guidance counselor for every 500 students.
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.
