DepEd, ACT lock horns over teacher hiring, classroom budget
The gloves are off once again as the Department of Education (DepEd) and the Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) duke it out via official statements over the latter’s proposal that the former hire 30,000 public school teachers and increase the classroom budget to P100 billion annually.
“Unrealistic and impossible” is how Vice President and DepEd Secretary Sara Z. Duterte in a statement dismissed the ACT’s proposals, while adding that it would place the government in a “precarious situation that will ultimately end in failure.”
Duterte also questioned the timing of the ACT statement and called out the ACT teachers for keeping mum about alleged “NPA-initiated violence in six towns of Masbate that affected over 55,199 learners and 2,815 school personnel.”
“ACT Teachers, while silent about the NPA operations, apparently needed to come up with something outrageous to divert the public’s attention away from the damage that the NPA attacks caused to our Masbate learners,” Duterte stated.
Following Duterte’s pronouncement that DepEd plans to hire new teachers every year, ACT Philippines called for the hiring of 30,000 new teachers each year up to 2028 to resolve the teacher shortage, decrease the class size to 35 students each, and improve the quality of education.
Additionally, House Deputy Minority leader and ACT Teachers partylist Representative France Castro also urged the government to set an education budget that was at least 6% of GDP to address the classroom backlog of more than 165,000 rooms.
Duterte declared that the Marcos administration “will not be pressured, hoodwinked, or distracted by groups like ACT Teachers,” while ending with the cheeky “Nice try, ACT Teachers.”
Consequently, ACT Philippines issued a press release calling DepEd’s response to ACT’s demands for more teachers and classrooms as “scandalously malicious.
The press release also declared Duterte guilty of “coming up with something outrageous to divert the public attention away” from the ineffectiveness of the current government in addressing the problems of education.”
ACT blasted the Education Secretary for resorting to “her favorite pastime of red-tagging ACT to muddle the issue. While VP Duterte busies herself with her conspiracy theories, sadly, our teachers and learners remain embroiled in deep education crisis.”
Netizens got out their popcorn and put in their two cents’ worth. Many pointed out that under the administration of President Benigno “PNoy” Aquino III, DepEd hired 258,000 teachers and constructed a total of 185,000 schoolrooms, according to former Education Secretary Armin Luistro. Therefore, netizens said, the ACT’s proposals are not unrealistic and impossible, because the PNoy administration had accomplished the same goals and more, even without an “intelligence fund” to dip into.
