EDITORIAL - Overworked, underpaid

You saw them at the polling precincts. Up at daybreak, sweating all day, scolded by people who couldn’t find their names in the voters’ lists, home late in the evening. After voting ended, they had to guard ballot boxes until the laborious manual tallying started. Poll duty will continue for many of them until the canvassing is over. For their labors, they were promised a daily allowance of P900. Election day passed and nearly half a million public school teachers who rendered poll duty still haven’t been paid by the Commission on Elections. You can’t blame the teachers for picketing the Comelec main office.

The plight of these teachers should remind the government of the approaching school opening, where there is a shortage of thousands of teachers. While still considered one of the noblest of professions, teaching has lost its allure for many Filipinos. Young girls who used to dream of becoming teachers or entering the nunnery now want to become lawyers, broadcast journalists or even – why not – president of the Philippines. Not too many schools can afford to pay their teachers salaries and benefits commensurate to the qualifications required of a good educator. Because of the poor pay in most schools, thousands of teachers prefer to work as maids abroad. Menial work, but such jobs offer double or triple the salary of a public school teacher in this country.

The government, saddled by a gaping budget deficit, can offer no quick fix to this problem. Other government workers including more than 100,000 cops are toiling for salaries that are just a little above the minimum wage. But the government will have to attract more and better qualified teachers if it wants to improve the nation’s most precious resource – its people. The difference in the quality of education offered by the country’s best schools, which only a fraction of the population can afford, and the majority of the other learning institutions contributes to a widening social divide.

If the nation wants to survive and compete, the majority of Filipinos must be equipped with more than functional literacy. This can’t happen without enough qualified teachers. But why join the ranks of those who can’t even get P900 on time for rendering poll duty? No wonder Hong Kong and Saudi Arabia beckon.