Excellence resulting in the greatest injustice of all

If “the road to hell is paved with good intentions,” many dedicated and qualified educators and executives at the Department of Education or DepEd, have been living with their demons for as long as seven years.

This is not an attack against the DepEd because it is merely a government office or in the simplest of form, a building with an address in Pasig City. Besides which there is a new administration, so to blame the past or shake down the present does not really help. This article is in no way an “expose” because I did not set out to unearth and reveal the ugly reality of life as a senior educator and executive of the DepEd. I will simply share what I came to know of from various people who apparently are dedicated civil servants who fell through the cracks because of policies and practices that were never figured out well before implementation.

I recently discovered the long and difficult process that teachers have to go through starting from teacher, assistant principal, principal, acting assistant schools division superintendent, to assistant schools division superintendent, to O-I-C SDS or schools division superintendent, to a full fledged SDS or schools division superintendent.

Depending on your performance, qualification, and connections as well as political endorsement, that journey could take anywhere from 25 to 30 years if not more. Along that journey the aspirant will have to pre-qualify by taking certain tests, securing clearances from the NBI, the Office of the Ombudsman, as well as endorsement from your immediate superior at the region and from DepEd.

Aside from the basic degree, you have to go through the four qualifying stages of the Career Executive Service Board (CESB), the Career Executive Service written examination (CESWE), Assessment Center performance validation process and panel interview as well as the Educational Management Test (EMT). Aside from being extremely difficult and no one providing training, pre-qualification or tutorials for our education executives, I learned that the CESO and EMT are given approximately three to four times a year, is conducted only in selected places in the country requiring takers to travel great distances and just like Mary and Joseph have to find cheap accommodations to stay in. Since thousands of civil servants with master degrees and sometimes PhDs  take the tests, it is often first-come first-served so it is not easy to get a slot and it is not cheap.

Even the performance validation and process and the panel interview are not given on set dates but subject to the availability of the panel of experts or qualified interviewers from DepEd Manila.

With very little info on subject matters to review and with no room at the inn, it is quite common for many examinees to fail the test two,three or four times. By then they have taken numerous leaves without pay and spent for several round trip tickets for boat or plane fare, the tests and accommodation. That alone costs them a lot of money not to mention shame and discouragement. As several senior mentors put it: “we don’t test infants or toddlers for IQ, we teach them what they don’t know. So why is the government fixated on grilling us but not teaching us. A test is supposed to determine how good you’ve taught a student and how much the student has learned. What is the sense in testing us for something we were never taught and trained for?”

Unfortunately the “Cirque Cruel” or cruel circus does not end there. I’ve met people who held O-I-C or acting positions anywhere from a year and a half to seven years, yes they got the title and the responsibility but they did not get the pay rate for the job. The government actually short-changed them! Some are losing or lost P3,000 a month to P10,000 a month. Others were so humiliated because the assistant appointed to a permanent position end up with salary grades 2 levels higher than theirs. One person estimates financial loss at P207,000  from the time she qualified to the position of ASDS to the time she was actually appointed. Another mentor wrote that after computing salaries she could not collect and allowance for quarters or housing for 70 months denied her, she had been deprived of approximately P1,648,000. But what she and many others like her resented and called: “the greatest injustice of all, was withholding the appointment when I was eligible for the position.”

Yes, it is truly an injustice when you’ve held a post as “Acting” or “O-I-C”  for several years and then a guy called P-Noy signs a memorandum circular requiring people holding such positions to be CESO qualified. Several of them did not ask for the post, were given the job but not the pay and to top it all other people who were not qualified, got the job because of local political realities. To add insult to injury, many of these holders of masters and doctorates would be required to get clearances along with their supporting papers and were told to submit them to Malacañang where the papers languished for over a year with no action whatsoever. What El P-Noy failed to comprehend was that the clearance from the Ombudsman was only good for six months. So applicants and aspirants would have to reapply and renew their submission once again! 

It is absolutely unjust not to correct the injury we have caused the most senior of mentors and executives at the DepEd. If we require competence from them, the CESB should stop being stiff boards for compliance and also invest on tutorial programs, familiarization as well as giving the CESO exam nationwide as a service to those in the civil service. Government qualifying exams should also be given at no cost to career or current employees. It is government’s investment in its people. The panel interviews should be given frequently and regularly with several teams of people and not based on availability. Clearances for career officials should have a longer shelf life or the bureaucrats in Malacañang ought to get their act together! If you’re not convinced, read the next line and look at yourself in the mirror:

“I have lost many things in this journey; financial, physical, mental but the most that I regret was the time away from my family without just compensation and my failure to deliver on my promise to both my parents, who did not even finish elementary, that I will bring them to my oath-taking as a full-pledged Schools Division Superintendent. They both died last year.“