Teachers’ group renews call to reduce teaching time to 4 hours in public schools

The Alliance of Concerned Teachers - Philippines on Wednesday called on the Department of Education (DepEd) to ease the workload of public school teachers and reduce their actual teaching time to four hours daily.

In a statement, ACT Philippines spokesperson Ruby Bernardo described the public school educators’ non-stop teaching for six hours daily as “simply inhumane,” saying that the DepEd has “maxed [them] up” with such practice. She also said that other teachers had to do workloads that sometimes exceeded six hours.

She thus appealed to the Education department to give public school teachers more time to prepare their lessons, check outputs, compute grades, and monitor the progress of their students to deliver quality education.

“It is equivalent to 6 to 9 classes handled daily for 40 minutes to one hour class time, depending on the subject taught. Dapat i-konsidera rin na ang mga klaseng ito ay bumibilang mula 45 hanggang 60 estudyante o higit pa. Sobrang piga na sa pagod ang ating mga guro pagkatapos ng maghapon na pagtuturo, at ang nalalabing dalawang oras ng trabaho sa isang araw ay napupunta pa paggawa ng mga reports at non-teaching duties,” Bernardo said.

(It should also be considered that these classes have 45 to 60 students or more. Our teachers are already very tired after a whole day's teaching, yet still the remaining two hours of their work are spent on making reports and non-teaching duties.)

The group's party-list representative, France Castro, as well as Reps. Arlene Brosas of Gabriela and Raoul Manuel of Kabataan earlier filed House Bill No. 545 that seeks additional compensation for public school teachers "after the teacher has completed at least four hours of actual classroom teaching a day."

The Magna Carta for School Teachers mandates teaching hours at six hours per day.

ACT argued that the workload of public school teachers is the “heaviest” compared to the workload of teachers in local private schools or public universities, and their counterparts in other countries. Due to this, Bernardo said that the teachers’ physical and mental well-being are being “sacrificed” at the end of the day.

“Overworking our teachers is counterproductive to education recovery. We need less teaching and non-teaching load. We need more time to prepare our lessons and fulfill other teaching-related duties to be able to deliver quality teaching,” she said.

“We need our rightful time to rest. If we want the quality of teaching to improve, we need to reduce to four hours the daily time allotment for actual teaching, while the other four hours should be used for lesson preparations and other teaching-related duties,” she added.

Section 13 of the Magna Carta For Public School Teachers states that teachers engaged in actual classroom instruction “shall not be required to render more than six hours of actual classroom teaching a day, which shall be so scheduled as to give him time for the preparation and correction of exercises and other work incidental to his normal teaching duties.”

However, if there is a need for their service, teachers may be required “to render more than six hours but not exceeding eight hours of actual classroom teaching a day upon payment of additional compensation at the same rate as his regular remuneration plus at least twenty-five per cent of his basic pay.”

Bernardo said that the DepEd is using such a law to “squeeze [them] to the hilt.”

“Instead of easing our workload, the DepEd is wielding the Magna Carta to squeeze us to the hilt. Instead of recognizing the 6-hour rule as the maximum limit, they have deemed it as the teachers’ regular load. It is their way to make it appear that there are excess teachers in some schools that they can transfer to others wherein shortage is really flagrant,” she said.

For DepEd’s part, spokesperson Michael Poa has repeatedly said that they are looking at “reducing or totally eliminating” the administrative and special tasks of teachers.

He also said that DepEd will determine how many non-teaching personnel will be hired based on their assessment on the volume of administrative tasks of teachers.

On September 15, Poa said that the agency’s Bureau of Human Resource and Organizational Development-Organization Effectiveness Division will issue a policy on working hours, and launch this year a “workload balancing tool” that could identify how many hours teachers allot for contact hours in class and for admin tasks.

GMA News Online sought the comment of Poa regarding ACT’s new statement, but he has yet to respond as of posting.—LDF, GMA News