After suffering a backlash from educators following his push to improve teacher quality purportedly to address the education crisis, a group of education workers advised Senator Sonny Angara to study the working conditions of teachers to “better understand the education crisis.”

“Teachers naturally took offense at his remarks that implied they were 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—from which many of us are still recovering,” Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) Philippines Secretary General Raymond Basilio said in a statement on Tuesday, Aug. 10.

Basilio stressed that instead of “passing on the blame and responsibility to improve the state of education to beaten down teachers,” Angara and other legislators should “dig deeper to better understand the issues hounding education.”

Teachers, Basilio explained, take on an “enormous amount of non-teaching tasks on top of their full teaching loads” with class sizes of up to 50 students which is “way beyond the recommended class size for optimal learning.”

ACT noted that teachers are also “overburdened with paper works that do nothing to improve education quality” - which include the Individual Performance Commitment Review Form (IPCRF) 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 (MELCs), and multiple reports for various DepEd programs.

“All of which has resulted in the denial of teachers’ much-deserved and direly needed break after working non-stop for 13 months since June 1, 2020, and has forced them to render additional overtime work on top of last school year’s uncompensated overtime,” ACT said.

Basilio stressed that on top of all these, teachers remain to be the “lowest paid professional” in the public sector. Their salary grades (SG) start at SG 11 or P23,877 per month as compared to nurses whose salary grades now start at SG 15 or P33,575 and police and military whose base pay now at P29,668.

“Their allowances and benefits are still paltry despite the bigger operational expenses under the distance learning setup,” Basilio added.

ACT also argued that teachers have always shouldered the state’s duty to deliver education all these years. Basilio also noted that teachers have also been filling in the gaps in the yearly lack of 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,” Basilio said.

Basilio emphasized that 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 undersupported.”

ACT noted that the teachers’ poor working conditions are also “students’ learning environment” --- thus, an immediate action coming from the government is needed to address the education crisis.

To address the poor working conditions of teachers, ACT called for the de-loading of non-teaching tasks and unnecessary paperwork, upgrading their salaries to at least SG 15, providing ample and timely benefits, and allocating bigger funds to education.