OVERBURDENED workloads and not low salaries prevent teachers from focusing on teaching children enrolled in public schools, according to a report released by the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS).
In a discussion paper, a team led by PIDS Senior Research Fellow Jose Ramon G. Albert found that teachers enjoy average wages of P22,074 per month, nearly double the median monthly wage of wage and salary workers at P11,277 nationwide.
However, apart from teaching responsibilities, teachers are burdened by administrative and other community tasks that add to their daily workload and significantly reduce their time for academic tasks.
“They prefer to focus on their actual teaching responsibilities, and spend more time speaking with students, and applying what they learned about differentiated teaching, but they are faced with huge time constraints,” the researchers said.
“Their main concern in ensuring quality of learning is their workload and not their salaries as understandably, bigger salaries will not create more time for them to devote to teaching,” they added.
Apart from devoting six hours of actual classroom instruction daily, teachers are expected to provide administrative and student support tasks, including report writing on seminars and trainings they are tasked to attend.
They also provide student guidance, budget, disaster response and other health tasks geared toward students and the communities they belong to.
These also include the implementation of government programs such as community mapping, mass immunizations, and deworming.
Teachers are also tasked to conduct school feeding, the conduct of population census, distribution of cash transfers, carry out anti-drug programs, and serve as election officers in their locales.
“The teachers report that these nonteaching tasks are not figured into their staffing patterns,” the report stated.
“(As a) consequence, public school teachers have to double up responsibilities, doing the administrative work—which can eat up on their time for ensuring quality of learning in the classroom,” it added.
Addressing this means the Department of Education (DepEd) should examine the time use of teachers. The DepEd must coordinate with the Budget Department to hire administrative staff for public schools, including guidance counselors.
This will help deload teachers and give them the time to focus on their academic tasks. “Public schools could also be encouraged to accept undergraduate students pursuing primary and secondary education programs to assist them in non-teaching tasks as part of their on-the-job training.”
Having effective teachers thatcan “raise basic competencies of learners and contribute to a positive learning environment” will help boost the country’s chances of attaining Sustainable Development Goal 4 on Quality Education.
Under SDG 4, by 2030, the world needs to substantially increase the supply of qualified teachers, including through international cooperation for teacher training in developing countries, especially least developed countries and small island developing states.
