Quality teachers: Whose business?

The prospective appointment of incoming Vice President Sara Duterte as secretary of education has invited comments from the broad educational sector and attentive public. The problems in the educational system, as magnified by the pandemic, now in its third year, leave no room for “on-the-job training” for whoever is designated secretary of education.

However, there is a silver lining to these dark clouds. A secretary of education, who is not a “combatant” in the raging policy reform debates in the educational sector, can exercise a healthy distance to appreciate the various options for moving forward. The secretary becomes the policy battlefield that educational policy advocates and institutional and professional stakeholders will attempt to engage and influence.

The question really is whether the incoming secretary of education, exposed to contending policy advocacies and immediate demands for juicy appointments, budgetary, and logistical decisions from political creditors, will be able to “navigate by the stars” rather than “every passing ship”?

If the incoming secretary’s navigational sense is sound, then there is an opportunity to do well. On April 27, President Duterte signed a law for carrying out deep and far-reaching reforms in the educational system.

This law is Republic Act. No. 11713 or the Excellence in Teacher Education Act.

Pasig Rep. Roman Romulo, the principal author of the bill in the House of Representatives, explained that the performance of Filipino students was low in several international assessment indicators such as Pisa (Programme for International Student Assessment), TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study), and SEA-PLM (Southeast Asia Primary Learning Metrics). Romulo said quality teachers are key to raising the quality of education for the learners.

Sen. Sherwin Gatchalian, the principal author in the Senate, emphasized that the new law will ensure coherence and continuity between pre-service (before becoming teachers) and in-service (while already teaching) teacher education. It will also guarantee that professional standards for teachers and school leaders are applied fairly and consistently. To support these goals, the law will enable extensive research directed at teacher and school leader quality.

The new law reinvents the Teacher Education Council (TEC), which was established in 1994 through RA 7784. As reconstituted, the TEC will be chaired ex-officio by the secretary of education with the chair of the Commission on Higher Education as vice-chair. The other ex-officio members of the council include the director-general of the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority, the executive director of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, and the chair of the Professional Regulation Commission (PRC). The regular members of the TEC will include a representative each from sectoral organizations of teachers, deans and educators, private schools, and school leaders from public or private schools.

The transition from the old TEC to the new TEC is far from cut and dry. The incoming secretary of education may well define, for good or bad, the direction the TEC will take. The TEC, as designed, leaves a lot of contentious issues of strategy, systems, and structure that will have to be hammered out if it will be effective as intended.

Among the key issues is how the attachment of this high-powered, multi-agency and multistakeholder council to the Department of Education (DepEd) could stymie the council from the start. The council should be the forum for resolving issues among the agencies and stakeholders mentioned above, including the DepEd as a partisan player.

Currently, there is a critical need to align the pre-service curricula (under the Commissioner on Higher Education), the in-service curricula (under DepEd), and the licensure exam for teachers (under PRC). The TEC — council and secretariat — should have greater institutional independence commensurate to its grand vision and mission of improving teacher quality across the land.

If the incoming secretary of education wants to have a wide view of the education landscape and see where the booby traps and the quick wins are, she should organize a national multistakeholder education summit to just improve everybody’s situational awareness of the real education system in the country.

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