This refers to an email from Manuel A. Collao on the alleged missing COLA of Naga teachers, which appeared on your June 9, 2005 issue. To set the record straight, allow me to point out the following:

1. The COLA is neither missing nor misspent, as Collao alleges and adverts to. The funds, both coming from the Special Education Fund (SEF) collected locally and internal revenue allotments released by the national government, are intact and available for release – once the proposed reform of the COLA scheme is finalized and approved.

2. Since 2002, when the effort to reinvent the School Board began, we have already advocated a change in the way public school teachers in the city get their allowance. Under the COLA scheme, every teacher gets P400 from the School Board budget and P350 from the General Fund of the city government per month regardless of whether he or she performed well or not.

3. Precisely because it is given across the board, this scheme, as it stands, does not encourage good teachers to continually improve their craft. To the contrary, it has fostered a false sense of entitlement that reinforces the attitude of just muddling along – which we cannot afford given the crisis facing our public school system.

4. This year, in spite of its inherent unpopularity among teachers, we are finally effecting a shift towards “performance-based” incentives. This was pointed by Mayor Robredo himself during the local education planning workshop on February 21, 2005, before some 250 stakeholders of the public school system – including representatives of the Naga City Teachers and Employees Association (NACITEA). In spite of the clamor to maintain status quo, he stood his ground and committed to do away with the across-the-board COLA and replace it with a scheme that rewards good teacher performance.

5. The original proposal was to apply that scheme to the P750 monthly COLA being given to public school teachers. But in the Board meeting that same month, it was agreed that NACITEA itself will come up with a formula that would implement such a performance-based incentive scheme.

6. In its meeting last June 15, the Board agreed in principle to adopt the following:
a. The performance-based scheme will apply only to the P350 component being funded out of the General Fund. This means that payment of the P400 being funded out of the School Board budget can already be processed.

b. For public school teachers, allocation of the General Fund-supported component will follow a two-step process: (1) high-performing schools, reckoned through results of the recently released achievement tests, will get more than low-performing ones; and (2) high performing teachers—reckoned through application of the formula prepared by the NACITEA, with help of Supt. Nenita Ramos—will get more than low performing ones.

c. Supervisory, administrative and non-teaching staff will individually get an equal share, to be pegged to the average incentive divisionwide.

d. Guided by the above, the School Board staff will prepare alternative sharing schemes because of the need to balance absolute academic performance (reflected by the final school ranking in the achievement test) and academic improvements made (reflected by the difference between pre-test and post-test during the school year). These schemes will be presented to the NACITEA Board and school level representatives on June 27, 2005.

7. In this context, the COLA payrolls and SPAs prepared and signed by teachers, if indeed true, were therefore based on the expectation that it will be “business as usual.” Fortunately, that is no longer the case.

Wilfredo B. Prilles, Jr.
Project Coordinator




Ferret out the truth!


”People Power”, as a means to achieve political change, used to be unheard of in the Philippines until 1986 when a military-initiated, people-backed, bloodless revolt ousted the 20-year old Marcos regime. Obviously inspired by such a feat that had positively placed the Philippines on the world’s limelight, various “rebel groups” led by power-greedy military and political bullies, had since then been staging a number of coup attempts, each with varying levels of violence and support from certain quarters with vested interests, against any government(s) they would deem vulnerable in their purported bid to see some needed reforms done.

Fortunately, as history would show, any military coup, if launched without the popular support from the people, is bound to fail. Bloody mutinies don’t seem to be acceptable to most Filipinos whose abhorrence to excessive use of violence still prevail no matter how justified or valid the causes those behind them may claim to have been fighting for.

Thus, any would-be coup plotters or destabilizers may do well to realize that the 1986 mutiny had succeeded mainly because hundreds of thousands of freedom-loving Filipinos, getting fed up with the excesses of Marcos’ authoritarian rule, came to the putchists’ rescue by risking lives and forming impregnable human barricades against the advancing forces having orders from the Marcos camp to quell the “rebellion”. Had the people stayed away and just watched the rebelling troops being crushed under the military might of the dictator, what could have happened to them and to Edsa 1? Could the likes of FVR, JPE or Honasan have lived to become the country’s President or lawmakers? History must have the accurate answers.

Anyway, it is true that the people have reasons to get disillusioned over the glaring ineffectiveness of the present dispensation in resolving the problems of rising cost of living, criminality, corruption, insurgency and poverty. And recently the wire-tapping and illegal-gambling controversies with which Pres. Arroyo and her family, respectively, are allegedly linked, are only exposing the government to more threats of destabilization, if not making it more vulnerable to military coups.
But the whole situation doesn’t appear yet to be too tragic to propel the people into supporting any violent option to replace their government at the expense of whatever democratic gains they have had in all these years. After all we now have under the Constitution the regular opportunity to change political leadership through democratic processes(?) and a press that is considerably free(?) to expose any excesses and bungling of the government including the military.

Of course, the people deserve the best government or anything better than what they have now. But then such aspirations cannot be attained through more extra-constitutional alternatives, let alone violent upheavals. Only the rule of law and justice, or whatever is left of them in our country, can make them happen. Or so we pray.

Let the truth be ferret out and the culprits brought to justice – and fast. Enough of official vaudeville! No to political destabilization! No more military adventurism!

There’s got to be a lot more effective way of punishing crooks in our government than merely calling for their ouster or allowing them to lord it over our political zoo with impunity. And there’s got to be a lot stiffer way of penalizing perpetrators and leaders of coup attempts and anarchy in our country than giving them punitive push-ups or reducing their rank status. Once proven guilty – and presto, these scoundrels have to face the full might of the law.

Otherwise, this nation remains doomed as ever. 
 
MANUEL A. COLLAO, via e-mail