Salary Grade 20 for Public School Teachers: A Few Thoughts

Senator Antonio Trillanes wants a Php 36,567 minimum salary for public school teachers.

As an *coughs* underpaid *coughs* private school teacher, these are my few thoughts:

1. This will mean a massive diaspora from private to public schools by teachers. Even before the proposed salary increase, it’s happening now. Private schools are experiencing a mass resignation and transfer of their teachers to a higher-paying public school. We cannot blame those who leave. Their family needs them. There was even one joke among us teachers that “our take home pay cannot take us home”. With this in mind, this will lead to…
2. The ‘death’ of some private schools that cannot match this salary grade. Take away the teachers from your school and what do you have? Nada. Or take this for example, if a school has no permanent teacher every school year (i.e. they transfer to public school after gaining a year of teaching experience), it would not thrive. There won’t be a continuity of the academic programs if you have new educators every year. 
3. If this would materialize, there will be an increase in enrollment of education-related courses. I have nothing against that. We need teachers. But what we need more are quality teachers. Better teachers. Best teachers. Especially with the new K+12 curriculum. There are some teachers who are only good in demo teaching. Trust me, I know. Heh!
4. I hope this would not be like what happened in the past when there was a sudden increase of students who took up nursing - only to end up being jobless and some nursing schools being closed due to its poor performance. We should not compromise quality of our educators by producing products of a another diploma mill.
5. I hope they also consider those minimum-wage-earning private school teachers who would be left behind, if this would see the light of reality. I suggest they increase the FAPE subsidy that they give every year. As of now, licensed private school teachers only receive 10,000 pesos in Government subsidy (sans the tax) every year as a way to ‘level’ them with public school teachers.

I have nothing against public school teachers (Salute mga Ma’am Ser!) and Sen. Trillanes’ proposal. I just care about my comrades in the Private School. I do not plan to be a teacher forever. I just consider this as my ‘past time’, a furlough of sort while waiting for a better career option. But, just maybe, I reconsider my options since I love what I’m doing right now.

And to cap this post, here are some unnecessary pictures of me, being happy with my job, er, service as a private school teacher:

Mabuhay ang mga guro!

Please take note that the things written here are my opinion and they do not reflect those of my employer’s and the school system that I work with. Thank you.