DepEd protects teachers amid poor result in international education assessments

Education Undersecretary Diosdado San Antonio explained that despite the Philippines performed poorly in previous international education assessments, rest assured teachers are “prepared” to deliver quality service.

In a Senate hearing, Senator Gatchalian asked San Antonio if DepEd is contented with the “teachers’ education”.

“Generally, I would feel that — because they are duly licensed — many of our fellow teachers are prepared to deliver what is expected of them. But there are multiple factors that influence the extent of commitment and competence that our fellow teachers would have,” San Antonio said.

“The literature is very clear that this is not a very simple concern. There are many factors that influence these things,” he added.

San Antonio believes that colleges and universities “offered their best to really train the future teachers,”. And DepEd also has “set requirements and guidelines in assessing the quality and performance of our future teachers.”

“What I’m saying is, we cannot just absolutely say that it’s satisfactory or it’s not but I would wish to believe that the teachers we hire are eager to be instruments of the provision of good quality basic education,” San Antonio said.

“But again when we talk about the quality of basic education, it’s not as simple as just fixing one aspect of the system. It entails a systematic approach and of course, the effort to strengthen the teacher education and professional development is a very important first step,” he added.

The Senate hearing was discussing measures to strengthen the Teacher Education Council. This is to improve the quality of teachers and school leaders in the country.

DepEd showed its support of the measure.

“We are unifying efforts, we are organizing the efforts to really be responsive to the challenges of the times and we are anchoring the efforts on the professional standards for Philippine school teachers as previously identified by the DepEd after a thorough research on what should be paid attention to in terms of the competencies we expect from our teachers,” San Antonio said.