Kabataan Partylist

Poor training, Low Salary Keep Education Grads from Teaching

The country has enough of Teacher Education graduates to plug the growing teacher-student gap but many of them fail to pass the licensure exam due to raw training and more opt to go abroad – or stay in the country – to work as housemaids.

“Every school year, more than 400,000 college hopefuls aspire to become teachers. Practically almost all tertiary or college level institutions in the country offer a degree in Teacher Education. Yet the country lacks roughly some 50,000 teachers,” Kabataan Party Vice President Carl Marc Ramota said.

“Only a fraction among the thousands who flock to Teacher Education are able to attain their dream profession. Specifically, only a little more than 100,000 education students reach the fourth year,” he said, citing the data from the Professional Regulation Commission.

“And of the more than 100,000 who graduate, only a few pass the licensure exams,” Ramota said, citing the poor performance of Education graduates in the 2006 Licensure Examinations for Teachers.

Only 17,377 out of 59,457 or a measly 29.23 percent of the examinees passed the exams for elementary education while 32.44 percent or 17,290 out of 53,303 examinees passed the test for secondary education in the August 2006 Licensure Examinations for Teachers (LET).

“The poor performance of our graduates in professional examinations is only reflective of the dismal state of our education system,” Ramota pointed out.

“Many Teacher Education institutions are producing half-baked graduates who add up to the bulk of LET non-passers and unemployed or underemployed teachers,” he said.

“Even these schools are now being turned into mere for-profit diploma mills rather than as training ground for future mentors.”

Ramota said many of those who manage to pass the LET eventually abandon their profession in favor of jobs that are available here or abroad.

“Sadly, of the current crop of teachers, the best and the brightest are now teaching abroad. Many of them are also leaving to work as domestics in other countries,” he added.

“The employment crisis, low salary and unrealistic professional regulation policies continue to plague the education profession.”
Since 2001, the salaries of government employees, which include teachers, have been frozen. The last salary increases were given in 2000, a 10 percent increase (P440) and five percent in 2001 (P242).

A teacher’s starting salary is only P9,939 a month, a little higher than the minimum wage in Metro Manila. Independent think-tank Ibon Foundation pegged the monthly cost of living in the National Capital Region at P20,454.61 or a difference of P10,515.61.

“We can’t blame our teachers for leaving the country or for working as housemaids. Whatever salary they receive does not correspond to their load of work,” he said.

A study released by the International Labor Organization (ILO) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) also show that teachers in the Philippines work an average of 1,176 hours per year and teach classes of over 50 students.

Ramota warned the country will see more classrooms with no teachers in the next years if the government and the Education department fail to arrest this alarming trend.

He feared that the problem in the shortage of teachers and poor performance in LET may lead to further decline in educational standards.

All of these, he said, send a distressing signal to the education sector. “We could only imagine what kind of students we are producing if their teachers are not adequately equipped with the appropriate skills.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 6th, 2007 at 8:53 am and is filed under News and Press releases, Education, Employment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.