VICE President and Education Secretary Sara Duterte on Monday rejected calls to hire 30,000 teachers yearly until 2028 to solve the current shortage experienced in public schools.
Duterte said the department aims to hire more educators and non-teaching personnel this year but the proposed number of hires annually is “unrealistic and impossible.”
“The call could not be coming from a place of genuine concern for the future of our learners and the welfare of our teachers,” Duterte said. “Instead, it is a call motivated by the group’s fascination for demands and goals that are unrealistic and impossible — placing the government in a precarious situation that will ultimately end in failure.”
Duterte was reacting to the suggestion of the Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) who offered this solution on Wednesday, March 22, in an attempt to solve the teacher shortage and attain the ideal class size of 35 students per classroom.
She added that massive hiring of educators until 2028 and allotting a P100 billion budget for classrooms annually are “obviously deceptive maneuvers” to divert public attention from the armed conflict in Masbate.
Duterte assured the public that the education department will tap into available technology to respond to challenges that the sector faces to ensure the effective delivery of basic education to Filipinos and uphold educators’ welfare.
“Our objective is to eliminate elements that contribute to learning losses, effectively implement reforms, and exercise fiscal responsibility by using resources wisely through innovations and mechanisms that will improve learning,” she added.
On the other hand, ACT said DepEd’s response to its call is “scandalously malicious.”
In a statement, the teacher’s coalition lashed out at the official for discrediting and red-tagging ACT for its demand to improve the quality of education in the country.
“The Alliance of Concerned Teachers cannot help but be appalled by the rabidness of Department of Education Secretary VP Sara Duterte to attack ACT, even on perfectly legitimate and logical demands of hiring 30,000 new teachers and constructing 50,000 new classrooms yearly, until 2028, to eradicate teacher and classroom shortages and improve education quality. Even more disgusting is her desperate bid to discredit our calls by maliciously connecting our good intentions to the armed conflicts in Masbate province,” it said.
ACT claimed that the upsetting state of the education quality in the Philippines is what prompted the coalition to propose such reforms to the department.
It also underscored that it has repeatedly raised this concern to previous administrations and “never has it happened before, though, that such demands be seen by no less than the education secretary as a ploy to ‘put the government in a precarious position.’”
The partylist also expressed its disappointment regarding the vice president’s remarks that the proposal is “unrealistic and impossible” and “archaic and ineffective” when she herself acknowledged the sparsity of such obstructions to education recovery.
ACT also criticized Duterte, saying that it is she who is diverting the public’s attention “from the ineffectiveness of the current government in addressing the problems of education.”
