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On September 17, a whistleblower on the “teaching item for sale” modus in the Department of Education (DepEd) Palawan was gunned down. Lawyer Joshua Abrina used to be DepEd Palawan’s legal officer. He resigned over a month ago after handling the “item-for-sale” case implicating DepEd Palawan Division Superintendent Dr. Elsie Barrios, who was later suspended over the issue.
“That modus has been carried out for some time,” said one of the participants in Multiply-Ed, a civil society initiative that aims to improve accountability in education governance. It conducts forum with education stakeholders to address findings in its monitoring and come up with shared proposed solutions to education issues and problems.
Most, if not all, of the participants in a forum that Multiply-Ed recently conducted — consisting mostly of school heads and teachers — affirmed that such corrupt activity happens in the very institution that is supposed to educate our children.
The “item for sale” modus is a system where teaching positions are allegedly sold. This practice may be driven by applicants demanding a position or by the discretionary power of a division superintendent. Teachers who are not the most qualified are being hired.
The ill-effect of such a practice could partly explain the deteriorating quality of education in the country. The Philippine Statistics Office recently reported that there are about 24.83 million Filipinos ages 10 to 64 years who are not functionally literate. Teaching quality is being deemed as a possible explanation for this.
“You would see that some people have credentials that they didn’t work hard for. They didn’t even undergo certain studies. It’s terribly sad. Then, the ones who graduated a long time ago and are qualified still didn’t get any position, while some who just graduated did,” another participant of the forum said in Filipino.
A member of a local school board lamented that, despite numerous qualified teachers for the position, they couldn’t hire them since the hiring of personnel is not part of their mandate. “Discretionary power is solely given to the SDO. That’s the sad truth. The SDO can choose from anyone because, again, discretionary,” the participant said.
‘The division superintendent is god’
“The division superintendent is god,” said one of the participants in the Multiply-Ed forum. Many shared that there are division superintendents who exploit this power to move teachers around and make space for new hires who paid for their positions.
Such action by some division superintendents is done almost unilaterally that even the public schools district supervisor (PSDSs) are not aware of the teachers who are being hired in the schools within their jurisdiction. A Multiply-Ed participant mentioned that there is a lack of transparency in the hiring of teachers, even within DepEd.
“We called our PSDS, and they said that teachers just show up in their schools…. They are the PSDS, yet they have no inkling. If there is someone who should be the first to know, one of them is the PSDS,” stated another participant.
Another issue is where teachers get assigned. Assignments seem to be done in a discretionary manner by some division superintendents too. Some DS would designate teachers in schools outside their localities, contrary to existing policies. DepEd Order No. 3, series of 2013, states that bona fide residents must be prioritized for vacant public school teaching positions available in said residents’ locality.
“For example, I’m from Municipality A and, if I apply, I get assigned to Municipality B or Municipality C. Doesn’t make sense, right? Why can’t you just be assigned to teach in the locality you’re in?” a participant said.
Furthermore, DepEd Order no. 20, series of 2024, mandates a special Human Resource Merit Promotion and Selection Board (HRMPSB), with multisectoral membership chaired by the division superintendent, to assess teaching applicants. The board must constitute a quorum and must convene the applicants in a group to witness the board’s assessment of their submitted requirements. However, the above process is apparently not being followed in Palawan, where Abrina was gunned down, especially given the “items for sale” modus.
G-Watch’s recent TPA Now! paper on teaching quality underscores that unfair treatment of teachers — like assigning them in places far from their homes — is a critical issue that compromises teaching quality. Ivan Tanyag of the Philippine Institute of Development Studies noted that this forces teachers to use their limited personal funds to provide for their students, which is detrimental to their performance.
“The solution I see, which is no longer within our mandate, is for the national government to implement a process for hiring teachers that is not centralized in just one office,” a duty-bearer proposed in an X-Ed forum.
Division superintendents clearly enjoy huge discretion. The checks on their powers, however, are limited, if not ineffective. The lack of feedback system on the performance of division superintendents enables abuses of powers and bad performance. A recent paper by G-Watch with Accountability Research Center underscores the importance of enabling civil society to be involved in education governance to enhance accountability and check the exercise of power of those in government.
Enable participatory governance in education
While it is indeed an important policy to decentralize powers from the DepEd central office to local policy actors such as SDOs, it is dangerous if power becomes concentrated in the middle and not dispersed down to the ground. Republic Act 9155 states that, at the division level, only school division superintendents have the authority to hire, place, and evaluate all supervisors, school heads, and other teaching and non-teaching personnel.
However, DepEd Order No. 7, series of 2024, defines School-Based Management (SBM) as the decentralization of decision-making from central offices to individual schools. This policy aims to empower school administrators, teachers, and the community to create their own plans and strategies to improve school operations and the quality of education.
In light of SBM, school heads must be consulted when it comes to the hiring of teachers. Ideally, even local stakeholders in schools must also be consulted. School Governance Councils and local school boards are mechanisms that enable collective leadership and participatory governance in schools.
Multiply-Ed has been calling for student representation in local special bodies to help in enhancing responsiveness of local education governance. Such efforts will not be effective if power remains concentrated in the hands of a few at the top or the middle.
Along with the decentralization of powers down to the ground and efforts to enhance accountability, resources also must be decentralized. There is a need to check which procurements can already be left to divisions and schools to address inefficiencies. More budget should be left to be managed at the school level while being allocated according to needs.
There is also the huge policy question of whether it is time that we formally decentralize education by amending the Local Government Code of 1991. DepEd’s huge bureaucracy is causing a lot of inefficiencies leading to abuse and corruption, including the recent item-for-sale modus. Without correcting the possible structural reason to this, all solutions could just be stopgaps that could be effective on the short-term, but could be adding to complications in the already-complex huge bureaucracy of DepEd in the long run.
What justice for Attorney Abrina should look like
To date, Palawan DepEd Superintendent Barrios is only under three-month preventive suspension. The investigation needs to be made transparent. If he is proven guilty, the penalty cannot just be suspension or reassignment. For a scam to not happen again, the penalty must be harsher and it must come with corresponding policy reforms.
The perpetrators of the killing must also be held to account. Especially today, given the need for people to stand up against corruption following the floor control scandal, voices of dissent, truth-telling, whistleblowing, and complaining must be supported and those who try to curtail it must be swiftly punished. We need to normalize and enable complaining against corruption and abuse, especially in the institution that educates our children. – Rappler.com
Jaillen Cabarillos is a program officer at Government Watch (G-Watch) and Joy Aceron is convenor-director of G-Watch and a researcher at Accountability Research Center. Both are involved in Multiply-Ed, an accountability initiative on education governance.
