DAVAO CITY – Teachers’ groups branded as anti-worker and anti-union the Department of Education’s results-based performance management system (DepEd-RPMS) to rate teachers.
“Yes, it is an anti-worker and anti-union. It is yet another scheme meant to extract even greater productivity from public school teachers who are already grossly overworked yet underpaid,” said Alliance of Concerned Teacher Rep. Antonio Tinio in a phone interview with DavaoToday.
Tinio called DepEd-RPMS “divisive”, describing it as intended “to weaken workers’ solidarity in the workplace and undermine unionism”.
“The individualized incentive scheme is pure deception,” he added.The DepEd’s Results-based Performance System is an organization-wide process to ensure that public school teachers focus work efforts towards achieving DepEd’s Vision, Mission and Values (VMV).
DepEd said the new performance system was approved by the Civil Service Commission.
DepEd said that “it [RPMS] is a systematic approach for continuous and consistent work improvement and individual growth.
The DepEd Strategic RPMS Framework will be rolled out beginning this month.
Public school teacher Gustavio Melendrez (not his real name), 38, viewed the new performance scheme as another “work load and burden” to his daily routine as a teacher.
“Public school teachers are burdened already of voluminous paper works and here comes RPMS giving us another load of burden,” Melendrez complained.He said that instead of maximizing the contact hours in teaching his students, he had to slash his class time just to do his school-related reports.
Riza Gomez (not her real name), 26, a Kindergarten teacher, told DavaoToday that RPMS will only yield a negative implication, citing “discrimination” among the ranks of public school teachers.“It [RPMS] will only sow discrimination among the teachers because RPMS employs subjective type of rating the performance of a teacher and there’s a tendency of giving unequal benefits as a punishment for those who are not performing well,” Gomez said.
Benjo Basas, national president of Teachers Dignity Coalition claimed that the scheme is a clear “anti-labor” policy of the Aquino government.
Basas told DavaoToday that the main issue with RPMS is the 130% expected output requirement that a teacher needs to accomplish.“Everybody would struggle to reach the outstanding remark with a 130%
expected output. DepEd is treating us like mechanical workers that are obligated to have a high production output just to save business capital. Eventually, the government would not need to hire more teachers because they believed that they hired are flexible ones,” Basas said.
He warned that those public school teachers who performed low in RPMS may be terminated saying they they would be subjected to administrative process.
“RPMS can be used as a tool to show the teacher’s performance and on this issue, teachers are in the losing end.”
A DepEd official who requested anonymity for lack of authority to publicly speak on the issue, explained however, that DepEd’s Strategic RPMS Framework “wants to establish a culture of performance that produces the desired results and builds competencies in the education department.”
“The success of our agency [DepEd] is largely determined by the performance of our teachers. Thus, we need to be certain that they
[public school teachers] are working hard in achieving DepEd’s strategic objectives as part of the K to 12 implementation,” the DepEd official said in a text message to DavaoToday.
When questioned if RPMS is an anti-worker policy, he said: “No. There is nothing in RPMS that can be perceived as anti-worker. What RPMS requires is only to achieve what a teacher must be achieved. Nothing more. Nothing less.” (davaotoday.com)
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