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July 05, 2009
3. Highlights of the Week(s) II, part 1!!
This post will cover the highlights of the past two weeks at my internship. A few days were set aside for various cross-sector activities, and the next 10 days were devoted to ASSERT. No epic protest march this time, but still lots of walking through the hot, hot heat, albeit with lesser purpose.
WEEK AND A HALF WITH ASSERT! (The organization for teachers’ rights and education reform – see blog post #1.)
• Orientation: I had a preliminary discussion with one of the ASSERT national leaders about the state of Philippine education, the situation of public school teachers, and the relationship between the two. In a nutshell:
There are too many students, too few teachers, and too few classrooms. There is also too little funding. Average class size and teacher-pupil ratio for public schools are the worst in Southeast Asia. Officially, those numbers are 44 and 35:1, respectively. (Though after visiting a number of schools, I am questioning the reliability of those figures – see below.) ASSERT characterizes Philippine education as elitist, given public education’s low priority on the national budget and high dropout rates (because many kids – even during elementary years – have to choose work over school). Also troubling is the growing prevalence of private schools and the increasing inaccessibility of public universities due to relatively steep tuition fees. Even if all these problems aren't unique to the Philippines, the fact that the U.S. crafted the country's education system probably explains why much of this sounds like America's education troubles.
So as in the U.S., and probably many other countries, public school teachers here are overworked, underpaid, and among the worst-off government employees. Starting salaries are about 14,000 Philippine pesos per month ($290). Twenty-four years of teaching, or 8 salary steps, would only yield a 2,000 peso ($40) increase in monthly salary. The cost of living may be lower here than in many places, but $10 dollars a day is still just enough to survive and certainly not enough to support a family. It is pretty clear that if you want to be a teacher here, you must have an additional job, relatives working overseas, or a daughter working in a call center.
When teachers try to organize and demand higher wages, better benefits, shorter hours, or any other improvements, they are often threatened by school district officials, and sometimes even harassed by the military. What is frustrating – while also encouraging – is that Philippine laws do grant teachers with a range of rather generous rights and protections. The problems are: 1) The laws are badly abused by the government and Department of Education; 2) Most teachers are not familiar with them; 3) Those teachers who do know their rights are afraid to assert them for fear of harassment and losing their jobs. I have been tasked by ASSERT with writing a paper that summarizes this education mess in nice language before my time here is done. There should be some better data and analysis in there which I can share in a later post.
• Assembly and teacher training in Nueva Ecija province: A 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. marathon of educating local educators about new national legislation affecting their salaries, the GSIS, and their rights. The fifty-plus school teachers and principals in attendance were all members of the Gapan Public School Teachers Association – an association with which ASSERT had never yet met. As it was one of my first real activities with ASSERT, I was limited to observation and PowerPoint operation. I’ll admit that I had grown quite bored by hour three, but fortunately in Filipino culture you must feed your guests every two hours. It also helped that the most interesting part was saved for the final third of the training.
The three hour closing segment was devoted to a lesson on teachers’ rights, as guaranteed by a national law enacted in 1966 known as the Magna Carta for Public School Teachers. The ASSERT Secretary General and unofficial comic (who was suspended from teaching twenty years ago after leading a nationwide teachers strike) went through all 32 sections of the law. While I was captivated by his employment of a 33-letter pneumonic device (MAGNA CARTA FOR PUBLIC SCHOOL TEACHERS) as well as his ability to sustain his charisma, enthusiasm, and highly animated hand/arm gestures for three hours, I was, of course, struck by the significance of what was going on. Most of the teachers were learning of their rights for the first time. Upon hearing some of the sections, the whole room would erupt in muttered disbelief and our speaker would have to assure them that they understood correctly. It really was empowerment – or at least the foundation for empowerment – in action. So now I have a decent understanding of the “E” in “ASSERT” (Action and Solidarity for the Empowerment of Teachers), but I’m still trying to figure out the R and second S.
• School visits: To obtain an initial glimpse into the state of Philippine public education, one of the ASSERT national coordinators took me to visit a handful of public elementary and high schools. Things could be much worse, but they are still pretty bad. Only one of three elementary schools we visited had an average class size under 45 students, and that was because legislation had been passed in the district which limited class size to that number. Most of the high schools averaged between 60 and 70 students per class. Due to a limited number of classrooms, almost all schools are forced to run in two sessions – one batch of students has class in the morning (7 a.m. to noon) and another has class in the afternoon (1 p.m. to 6 p.m. or 2 p.m. to 8 p.m.). Air conditioning is only to be found in the principal’s office, if at all. Classrooms are hot, crowded, and generally terrible environments for any sort of learning. At one school I visited, a number of classes have to be held out on the basketball court due to a shortage of rooms. But again, things could probably be worse. Many schools receive funding to operate feeding programs for underweight and undernourished students and programs to reintegrate students who have previously dropped out.
Posted by Isaac Jabola-Carolus at July 5, 2009 10:19 PM
