ARMM ramps up competency evaluation of teachers

COTABATO CITY, Philippines  --- The education department of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao is banking on the Teachers' Assessment and Competency Exam (TACE) to ensure that mentors in its ranks are competent and qualified to help build peace-loving communities.

John Magno, assistant regional secretary for operations of the ARMM’s Department of Education, said the TACE seeks to assess the proficiency of teachers and boost the quality of education in the region.

Magno said the process requires aspirants to teaching positions to undergo competency examinations, panel interviews and teaching demonstrations.

“This mechanism will ascertain that only `quality teachers’ will be hired for a regionally competitive ARMM,” said Magno, who had studied industrial and education psychology in the United Kingdom.

He said new applicants will be ranked based on their TACE results, besides their passing rates in the teachers’ licensure exams.

The DepEd-ARMM  has ready conducted a series of competency exams to almost 500 applicants from the provinces of Basilan, Maguindanao, and Tawi-Tawi.

“We have yet to finalize the schedule  for Sulu which will definitely be conducted in Zamboanga City next month,"  said Mubarak Pandi, DepEd regional information officer said.

“This is a method to rank our teacher-applicants as to how they fare with the assessment results. TACE will serve as an equal opportunity for all applicants to cut away the ill practice of ‘palakasan," he added.

"They don't have to bribe education officials too just to get appointed," Pandi added.

The DepED-ARMM has been subject of extensive, continuing reforms since the regional government was placed under the stewardship an appointed caretaker, Mujiv Hataman, in December 2011.

The department was once touted as the ARMM’s most corrupt agency due to mismanagement by past administrations.

Hataman, who, subsequently, was elected as regional governor during the  May 2013 polls, and his education secretary, lawyer Jamar Kulayan, had removed thousands of “ghost teachers" from the department’s payroll as part of the reform process initiated to professionalize its ranks.

Hataman and Kulayan also delisted dozens of non-existing schools from the department’s roster of schools that regularly receive maintenance and operating funds.

The reform process had resulted in the generation of P1-billion worth of savings from unspent operating funds and salaries the two officials managed to keep intact in the agency’s coffer in the past two years.

Magno said their efforts to ensure  the competency  of teaching personnel in the region is parallel with the efforts of the Hataman administration to address the problem of illiteracy in the autonomous region, which is partly being blamed for the area’s nagging security problems.

“We would like to be at par with other more advanced regions. We are in the right track and we would like to ensure quality education, and we are starting with the proficiency of our educators in ARMM," Magno said.