by JAILEEN F. JIMENO

In faraway Maguindanao and nearby Las Piñas, more children are failing to enroll and stay in school, and the ratio of students to teachers, classrooms and books is getting worse. These problems gain more urgency as schools start preparing for the opening of the new schoolyear in the next fortnight.

LAWYER FRANCES Cynthia Guiani-Sayadi talks to distraught “dead” teachers all the time, but she makes it a point to crack jokes when they call her on her cell phone at night.

	IN ARMM, the shortage in educators has been exacerbated by decades of corruption, abuse, and inefficiency within the Department of Education (DepEd) and the region’s officialdom. [contributed photo]

“I appeal to them, please don’t call me at night,” she says. “I’m afraid of you, you’re already dead.”

Guiani-Sayadi is the Solicitor General of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM). She has been given the horrendous task of putting order to the chaotic records of teaching personnel in the ARMM.

Perhaps macabre humor helps lighten the stress, since part of her assignment is talking to teachers who have been reported and certified dead, and for whom burial and insurance money had been collected.

So far the graveyard has yielded no corpses — at least not those of the teachers — but further investigations have unearthed tons of forged paperwork at all levels of the bureaucracy that are blamed on what some call “golden hands.”

	PREVIOUSLY PART 1 looks at Maguindanao, where the situation is made worse by bursts of armed conflict that keep students and their teachers away from schools for days on end, as well as by apparently skewed priorities. PART 2 looks at how Las Piñas in Metro Manila is struggling to keep children in school despite a severe shortage of teachers and classrooms.

A shortage in teachers has been cited as one of the reasons why the country’s education indicators have plummeted and why the Philippines is unlikely to meet the Millennium Development Goal of universal primary education by 2015. The lack of teachers, in turn, is due in part to the fact that only a fraction of the estimated half a million who enroll in education courses each year eventually graduate and pass the licensure examinations. In 2007, only 28 percent of over 124,000 who took the licensure exam passed.

For the past two decades, teachers have also been leaving the country in droves to work overseas — sometimes even as nannies.

TEACHER JOBS FOR SALE
In ARMM, which comprises eight provinces down south, the shortage in educators has been exacerbated by what many there say have been decades of corruption, abuse, and inefficiency within the Department of Education (DepEd) and the region’s officialdom. Indeed, it is probably difficult to find takers there for a profession that not only entails long hours, but has also become known for delayed salaries and benefits that go missing.

DepEd's Basic Education Information System (BEIS) data show that from 2003 to 2005, ARMM was home to 548,766 elementary school pupils and 13,701 locally hired teachers. The teacher-student ratio in the region was at the time estimated at 1:42. Excluding ARMM, the teacher-student ratio for the whole of Mindanao was 1:37.

But teaching has become a tainted profession in ARMM. National and local officials say, too, that some of the very people who are supposed to teach children moral values along with the ABCs have bribed their way into teaching posts and then “subcontract” their jobs.

To be fair, bribes in exchange for teaching positions is nothing new to the education department. Former DepEd Undersecretary Juan Miguel Luz admits that the practice of education officials demanding from a prospective teacher his or her salary for the first two months on the job is not unheard of. What is news to him is the idea of a teacher hiring someone else to handle a class.

“I’ve never seen that at the national level,” Luz says.

Many legitimate educators in ARMM say that several practices of their pseudo colleagues are unique to the region. They also say they have been complaining for years for local and national leaders to look into their plight.

Some have even called on ARMM Governor Zaldy Uy Ampatuan to resign if he fails to act on their problems. Last December, local officials finally urged President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo to help them look into the teachers’ complaints.

CRITICAL CONCERNS
Among those confirmed as critical concerns by initial investigation is a fund mess at DepEd ARMM: unremitted teacher contributions and loan payments to the Government Service Insurance System (GSIS).

In fact, the GSIS refused to process loans and benefits to ARMM teachers from 1997 to 2003, after failing to receive contributions from the region. Since 2004, the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) has resorted to withholding GSIS contributions and directly remitting it to the agency. But up to now, records of years past remain in disarray, preventing scores of ARMM teachers from obtaining a loan, among other things.

“We’re not talking of millions, we’re talking of a billion pesos here, for GSIS alone, for the whole of ARMM,” says Guiani-Sayadi.

She says there is no exact figure of how many teachers in the ARMM have been victimized by the GSIS-DepEd mess. But she laments that so many teachers who have left the service have yet to receive their benefits. “Some have died without receiving their retirement pay,” she says.

The problem is ARMM’s alone, as DepEd ARMM is autonomous. The national DepEd office merely acts as conduit in giving schools in the region their share of textbooks and chairs.

In the meantime, Guiani-Sayadi says the Philippine Public School Teachers Association (PPSTA) has also discovered that insurance and death benefits of some 50 teachers have been claimed and collected even though these educators are still living — and still at work in schools.