Investing in our human capital

In my multifaceted career, the most difficult, though psychically rewarding full time jobs were those as a teacher. I started out as a high school and college instructor in a missionary school in Baybay, Leyte; and wound up as a graduate school of business professor before moving on to independent management and social marketing consulting.

As a teacher, you actually hardly have weekends off, and have to work late hours preparing for class, checking papers, and rating student performance. This is what it takes if you want your classroom sessions to be worthwhile, and if you want to make a difference in the lives of your students.

To be an effective teacher, you also need to be gifted with fairly high intelligence, have obtained a good education, and must love the job enough to give it your all, because it really doesn’t pay all that much.

This is why I smart at the idea that policemen and soldiers will get double their salaries in the next couple of years; while nothing has been said for public school teachers. Of course, policemen, soldiers and public school teachers have had their salaries finally upgraded in the last few years. I can understand the large pay raises for soldiers who are assigned to battlegrounds where they can get maimed for life, or lose their lives. But do we value policemen more than we value our teachers?

How important is human development to our nation? Shouldn’t we be investing more in getting the best and the brightest to become mentors to our children and their children? We have decided to grant free tuition in our state schools and colleges. Shouldn’t we have granted as well higher salaries to teachers in order to attract the best and the brightest?

We are in the thick of the knowledge economy. We are certainly lagging behind many of our neighbors in so many fields, especially in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) track. Our investments in education as a percentage of our national budget are way below that of our neighboring countries which are way ahead in these fields. And there is no question that the impact of their investments in human capital is shown in their economic performances.

When Ferdinand Marcos first became president, our economy was second only to Japan in progressiveness in our part of the world. Today, having deposed the dictator, we are just a notch above Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos. Vietnam has overtaken us in coffee exports and soon, many other things. The Vietnamese have absorbed the Confucian values placed on education from their neighboring Chinese. They are attracting more foreign investments than we do and will soon overtake our economy.

I suspect that our decline is at least partly due to the fact that we had been losing our teachers who were going to Hong Kong as domestics for better pay. Some of our best schools have been losing good teachers to schools in the United States. And later, teachers have been moving into call center jobs, again for better pay.

With their increased pay scales, hopefully, this is less likely now. However, if the objective is building up our human capital for the next generations, and the sooner the better, we have to be clear on our priorities.

The Commission on Audit (CoA) now recommends a halt to expansion of the 4Ps program (Pantawid ng Pamilyang Pilipino), the World Bank-funded program that provides education and family health grants of up to P1400 per month per family (P300 schooling support per elementary school child and P500 for the mother’s health care). This has evidently led to lower drop-out rates after grade four among our children. The 4Ps are now supposed to include grants up to completion of high school (12K).

The CoA highlights the need to plug leaks of up to 30% in grant assistance to families living above the poverty line. Perhaps what we should do is continue expanding the grants while we work at plugging the leaks. There cannot be wastage if the money was spent on continuing children’s education and ensuring mother’s health, even if some of the recipients had overcome the poverty line.

After all, the 4Ps grants (formerly known as Conditional Cash transfers) are conditioned on many requirements: monitored attendance of at least 85% of school days; attendance at family seminars and mother and child visits to health centers for specified health services, etc.)

The CoA also questions the impact of the 4Ps program on poverty incidence as they have not found clear evidence that it has in fact accounted for the reduction of poverty incidence in our country. This is typical short-sightedness in our bureaucracy. The 4Ps is barely a decade old. This investment in human capital is aimed at reducing “intergenerational poverty.” It cannot make a palpable difference over the short-term. It is a program that looks at a long term impact, to the time that keeping our children in school for the longer term enables them and their families to conquer poverty. There is enough statistical evidence that the higher the educational level attained, the higher the incomes.

My home service massage girl, a solo parent, had been getting assistance for her three children and considered the 4Ps a boon from heaven. Earlier this year, she was disheartened to learn that the 4PS assistance was being suspended while the DSWD was undergoing review. I have been unable to reach my masseuse for months and have heard that she has not been well. I do hope that what she told me is not true, because if it is, it would be a tragedy.

We need to get our priorities right.

Teresa S. Abesamis is a former professor at the Asian Institute of Management and an independent development management consultant.

tsabesamis0114@yahoo.com