Second Thoughts : Avoiding harm

By: Edilberto C. de Jesus - Manila Bulletin

MANILA, Philippines — Senator Dick Gordon should be pleased; the President does sometimes pay attention to what he says.

It was apparently his observation about declining proficiency in English that prompted the President to focus on the poor English skills of public school teachers and to order the allocation of P500 million for additional English lessons for them.

Arroyo asked DepEd to identify the schools in the bottom 30% in English proficiency; the teachers in these schools would have preferential access to the training funds. The training program would form part of the in-service courses for the teachers. Arroyo directed that the remedial classes should be conducted during weekends to avoid disrupting the schedule of classes.

The President is certainly correct in her assessment that DepEd teachers would benefit from additional instruction in English. DepEd had reported this need to her four or five years ago, and DepEd Sec. Jesli Lapus is well aware of the problem. According to Lapus, only about 60 percent of the teachers passed a recent DepEd examination on English proficiency.

It would be useful to know the passing standards that teachers are expected to meet. But it would probably be safe to say that many of the 60 percent would also profit from additional lessons.

The public should, therefore, welcome the allocation of additional funds for teacher training; every little bit helps. But let us also recognize that P500 million will not go very far, given the scale of the problem Lapus has identified. Assuming that 100,000 teachers urgently need remediation in English, DepEd would have P5,000 for each teacher trainee. Can these teachers be expected to give up their weekends for training sessions without additional compensation? How many weekends can the DepEd afford?

We should also consider the costs to the teachers. How long would teachers be willing to commit to the government all seven days of the week? Even God rested on the seventh day. Or would the language course run only once a week on Saturdays? The issue then becomes the effectiveness of a language program conducted on a one-day-a-week basis. And how many weeks would be needed to produce a meaningful improvement in the language competence of the teachers?

These are basic questions that need to be asked and, hopefully, answered. The devil is in the details. Lapus has already pointed out that DepEd confronts a systemic problem. Teachers need assistance on many fronts. The expectations on what the teachers should be able to do continue to escalate in pace with the growing demands of the Knowledge Economy.

While the teachers are improving their English, where do they get the time to improve their grasp of the content of their subjects—and to learn the information and technology tools that can help them promote student learning more effectively? There is no cure-all, quick fix to the problems of an educational system that has suffered from decades of neglect and ill-conceived policies.

Remediation through inservice training on something as basic as the language of instruction is an inefficient strategy. Why should DepEd hire teachers who cannot handle the medium of instruction? DepEd can require proof of English proficiency as a requirement for job applicants. Even better, the PRC should require such proof as a condition for taking the licensure examination. This would put the burden of ensuring that prospective teachers have learned their English where it properly belongs — to the schools that graduated them.

These are, at best, medium-term solutions. But if we cannot cure the problems of education immediately, we can at least avoid making them worse. The concerns expressed by the President on the teachers’ command of English should provoke second thoughts among the congressmen pushing for the mandatory use of English as the medium of instruction for all subjects, starting in Grade III.

The situation is bad enough when teachers of English have to undergo additional training in that language themselves. The proposed law immediately and unnecessarily expands the number of teachers who must take remedial English classes. If so many of these teachers cannot speak correct English, does it make sense to compel them to teach in that language?

Unfortunately, this bill, if passed into law, is likely to punish most severely the communities that are already lagging behind in educational performance. A USAID project has discovered that many teachers in ARMM schools only have Grade 3 competencies in English. Mandating English as the medium of instruction in these schools place the children in double jeopardy; their teachers, even if they know the subject, will not be able to teach it well, and they are likely to learn bad English.

In deciding on this bill, the members of Congress might take as their guide the medical axiom: First, do no harm.