Underpaid and underappreciated

MADAM Secretary (Leonor Briones), with due respect, you got the wrong perception. Yes, public school teachers are underpaid and underappreciated and you cannot just cite the “migration” of private school teachers to the public school system to prove your theory.

The type of private schools that you are talking about are mostly violating the labor laws by giving their teachers heavy workloads yet pay them very low salaries and give them almost no chance of job security. That, of course, is worse than the situation in public schools.

The entry-level basic salary for teachers is only P19,600 subject to mandatory deductions. Allowances on top of it are also being paid to all government workers, not exclusively for teachers. We seem to have two months paid summer vacation leave, but most of the time, summer is also consumed for our school tasks--closing activities in April and preparation for school opening in May.

And may we remind you that unlike all other civil servants, teachers are teachers 24/7, the work does not stop when the bell rings. We take our tasks home, beyond 6 or 8 hours. And we are not entitled to sick or vacation leave.

Madam secretary, since the very first time when you sat as Education secretary, we anticipated reforms in the department and in the entire education sector. To give you an idea, the single most important reform that you can bring is to make the lives of teachers better. No education reform initiative could reach its goals if we will not put the welfare of teachers in paramount consideration.