ENROLLMENT for the new school year 2021-2022 is about to start. To address the crisis in education, there are well-meaning suggestions to improve teacher quality. But this is just one aspect of the gargantuan problem. And we can’t blame teachers for taking offense at the suggested solution that implies they are to be blamed for the poor state of education in the country, especially after laboring through the harrowing school year under distance learning with little to no support from the government — and from which many of the teachers are still recovering.
Instead of passing on the blame and responsibility to improve the state of education to beaten-down teachers, those offering suggestions better dig deeper to better understand the issues hounding education, specifically the working conditions of teachers.
Teachers take on enormous non-teaching tasks on top of their full teaching loads with class sizes of up to 50 students — way beyond the recommended class size for optimal learning. Teachers are also overburdened with paper work that do nothing to improve education quality, which include the Individual Performance Commitment Review Form that fails to accurately assess their performance as teachers, the Learning Delivery Modality that unnecessarily requires them to report in detail the contents and objectives of DepEd’s own Most Essential Learning Competencies, and multiple reports for various DepEd programs. All of these and more have resulted in the denial of teachers’ much-deserved and direly needed break after working non-stop for 13 months since June 1, 2020, and have forced them to render additional overtime work on top of last school year’s uncompensated overtime.
And on top of all these, teachers remain to be the lowest paid professional in the public sector. Their allowances and benefits are still paltry despite the bigger operational expenses under the distance learning setup.
Teachers have always shouldered the State’s duty to deliver education all these years, and have been filling in the gaps in the yearly lacking funds for education from their own shallow pockets. If anything, the only reason the youth enjoy their right to education is because our teachers insist on fulfilling their vocation against all odds, at their own expense, and despite the government’s failure to do its very mandate.
The real factor behind the chronically poor quality of education in the country is not teachers’ competencies but their working conditions — public school teachers are overworked, underpaid and under-supported.
Teachers’ poor working conditions are the students’ learning environment, thus immediate action from the government is a must to begin addressing the education crisis.
