Bringing quality back into public education

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.–Ernesto F. Herrera, Manila Times

ernestboyherrera@yahoo.com