05/10/2026
Pakikiisa sa laban ng mga g**o para sa kabuhayan at karapatan!
This World Teachers' Day, Listen to Education Workers
Recognition, participation, and just compensation
By Vic Aguilan, Board Member, Council of Teachers and Staff of Colleges and Universities of the Philippines (CoTeSCUP)
Every World Teachers' Day, we honor teachers for their dedication, commitment, and sacrifice. The recognition is deserved. But it is time to ask a harder question: How long can our education system depend on that sacrifice?
The findings of EDCOM II, the Second Congressional Commission on Education, make the question urgent. Created by Republic Act No. 11899, the commission was tasked by Congress with assessing Philippine education comprehensively and recommending reforms across early childhood, basic, and higher education, teacher education, technical-vocational education, governance, and financing. Its Final Report documents deep structural problems that cannot be solved by asking teachers to work harder.
EDCOM II found that 42 percent of teachers work more than 50 hours a week, much of it spent on additional duties, program activities, forms, and reports. Shortages of support personnel leave teachers handling logistics, procurement paperwork, event administration, and even budgeting and project management, taking time away from lesson preparation, assessment, remediation, and instructional leadership.
The problem reaches the future of the profession itself. EDCOM II reports that low salaries, excessive workload, and a perceived lack of government support discourage young people from entering teaching.
The lesson is plain: our education crisis is also a crisis of working conditions.
And it does not affect teachers alone. Schools, colleges, and universities depend on librarians, guidance counselors, registrars, administrative and clerical personnel, laboratory and IT staff, maintenance workers, and many others. They are part of the educational process, yet their work is too often invisible in discussions of education reform.
As a board member of CoTeSCUP, a campaign center and network of education workers' unions in the private sector, I believe World Teachers' Day should be an occasion not only to celebrate educators but also to listen to them. Three things deserve particular attention: recognition, participation, and just compensation.
Recognize us.
Teachers and staff are not simply implementers of reforms designed elsewhere. They are professionals and workers whose experience holds indispensable knowledge about what actually happens in classrooms and campuses. Schools and universities are not only places of learning; they are also workplaces.
This is true in both public and private education, though the pressures differ. Public-school teachers contend with plantilla items, the Salary Standardization Law, and chronic shortages of classrooms and personnel. Private-school teachers and staff face tuition-dependent budgets, insecure employment, and institutions that sometimes resist collective bargaining. Yet both sectors share one underlying problem: an education system that extracts more from its workers than it returns to them.
Include us.
EDCOM II consulted teachers, principals, parents, and other stakeholders in identifying problems in education. But consultation is not collective representation. Teachers' and education workers' unions are the democratically constituted representatives of the rank and file.
When policies affect workload, staffing, evaluation, professional development, employment security, compensation, or institutional restructuring, workers and their unions should have a meaningful voice in how those policies are formulated, implemented, and evaluated. The principle is simple: Nothing about education workers without education workers.
We recognize that meaningful participation is not easy to institutionalize. Private schools operate under fiscal and regulatory constraints. Some institutions are wary of unionization. Government agencies have their own mandates and timelines. But these are reasons to design participation mechanisms more carefully, not reasons to exclude workers from decisions that shape their working lives. Tripartite bodies, sectoral consultations with union representation, and grievance structures with real teeth are all possible. What is required is political will?
Compensate us justly.
This matters especially in private education. We recognize that private schools, colleges, and universities face real challenges in enrollment, operating costs, regulation, and institutional sustainability. But sustainability cannot be achieved by passing the burden to employees through inadequate wages, excessive workloads, understaffing, or insecure employment.
We also recognize the counterarguments. Some institutions say they cannot afford higher compensation without raising tuition beyond what students can pay. Some point to regulatory limits on fee increases. These are real constraints, not excuses to be dismissed. But they argue for systemic solutions (stronger government support for private education, rationalized tuition and subsidy frameworks, and shared responsibility among institutions, government, and society), not for preserving a status quo in which workers absorb the cost.
Just compensation should not be seen merely as another institutional expense. It is an investment in educational quality. No institution can retain good teachers and staff, sustain professional commitment, and demand excellence indefinitely without decent pay and working conditions.
Accountability must therefore run both ways. Teachers should be accountable for the quality of their work. Institutions must be accountable for reasonable workloads, adequate staffing, fair compensation, due process, and decent working conditions. And government must be accountable for building an education system in which quality does not depend on the continuing sacrifice of its workers.
A commitment, not another thank-you
EDCOM II has opened an important national conversation about how Philippine education must change. Education workers should not merely be asked to implement the answers. We should help shape them.
So this World Teachers' Day, perhaps the best tribute we can give teachers and education workers is not another message thanking them for their sacrifice. It is a commitment that they should no longer have to sacrifice so much simply to do their jobs well.
Recognize us. Include us. Compensate us justly.
Because education reform and labor justice are not competing agendas. The future of Philippine education depends on both.
