Wanted: really good school heads (2)

TO HELP me find answers to the question raised in the previous post, I found these bits of info from the Department of Budget website.

The first is a summary of how permanent positions in the national government plantilla are distributed by salary grade for 2005. The information is fascinating as it gives one the exact monthly basic salary the President gets (grade 33, P57,750 per month) down the line to the lowest state worker (grade 1, P5,082 per month). It is also quite familiar as the pay of the entry level teacher (grade 10, P9,939 per month) is also what the Naga City School Board pays for most of our 91 locally funded teachers.

The second is the DBM index of classes by salary grade, which essentially tells you which types of employees across the bureaucracy get the same basic salary. For instance, an Elementary School Principal I has the same basic pay as that of Secondary School Principal I and a Master Teacher III. All are grade 18, with a starting monthly take of P15,841.

These information essentially validate what our recently retired former Superintendent Nenita Ramos blames as the reason behind the current crop of underperforming school heads: salary differences between the master teachers (who are usually competent and would rather concentrate on teaching) and principals (who are usually average--if not lower--but more ambitious) are so insignificant that the former tend to stay on as teachers, instead of aspiring to become school heads. Consequently, this creates a two-track career path that allows the latter to rise to the top of the school's totem pole: to their level of incompetence as Laurence Peter famously described it, and to our public schools' sorrow and disadvantage.

This squares with what Clementina Acenedo of the World Bank proposed as one of several measures to improve teacher quality. In a paper entitled "Teacher supply and demand in the Philippines"--which incidentally supports an expanded mandate for the Local School Boards (our main advocacy)--Acenedo suggested

(I)ncentive schemes to produce desired behaviors in teachers. Start teacher salary in the Philippines is relative high in comparison to comparable countries in the region. However, the pay structure does not discriminate among teachers according to what they know and do. Future structural changes in teachers pay must raise the top end of the scale in order to widen the scale and create incentives. Widening the pay structure within grade levels will allow differentiation among teachers by competencies and performance.