The Philippine Business for Education (PBED) is calling on the Department of Education (DepEd) to decentralize its operations and to restructure the licensure examination given to teachers. The education advocacy group blamed the current system for the “poor” quality of teaching in the country, resulting in students “not learning” and not becoming competitive workers.
In a recent survey of 78 companies conducted by the group, it found that nearly 25 percent of entry-level jobs in 2016 were left unfilled because of the lack of qualified talent.
PBED also noted that students consistently had below-target achievement test scores for the last five years. In the same period, teacher applicants also fell below the government’s target passing rate of 53 percent.
Love Basillote, executive director of PBED, said that, because of the quality of education that students had been receiving, getting a diploma now “is no longer a sure-ticket to a better life.”
She pointed out that this problem might be rooted in the way DepEd had been operating over the years and how teachers were chosen.
According to Basillote, the sheer size of DepEd’s operations made it “impossible for any manager, no matter how good, to oversee effective education delivery from a head office.”
Currently, DepEd has around 28 million students and 800,000 teachers in more than 75,000 schools nationwide.
Chito Salazar, president of PBED, said that DepEd could operate more effectively if the central office’s standards-setting and implementing functions should be separated, with the latter being devolved to local offices.
“What happens now is that the one who implements is the one who also sets the standards,” Salazar said. “So the curriculum in Kalinga is exactly the same as the curriculum in Manila and in Marawi because that is one single system, despite the fact that there are different needs and circumstances.”
Shifting to this paradigm wouldn’t be much of a problem, Basillote said. She pointed to Indonesia as a model other countries could look at.
She added that there was also already the legal framework for it, based on the Local Government Code, under which some of the DepEd’s powers could be devolved.
In terms of licensing teachers, PBED suggested that the Board of Professional Teachers (BPT), which administer the exam together with the Professional Regulation Commission, look into how the engineering board conducts its tests.
Like the engineering board, Basillote noted that the BPT can solicit questions from top teaching institutions to help “improve the quality of the tests.”
She added that questions should also be released once the exam had concluded so that a proper analysis on the test could be done.
“We need to know if the questions are valid,” Basillote said. “If they’re good measures to really separate the qualified from the non-qualified.”
Since 2010, the passing rate in the licensure exam for teachers ranged from 33 percent to 42.6 percent, way below the 53 percent target passing rate of the government.
According to Salazar, a crackdown on the least performing schools should also be done by publishing which schools had the lowest passing rate so that parents would become aware and government could close them down. A similar strategy has been employed in nursing schools a few years ago. /atm