Teachers’ promotion fiasco an indictment of TSC

By JOHN KARIUKI

On Thursday, April 17 2014, The Standard led with the story of an imminent clash between the TSC and the teachers union Knut, over promotion of teachers. The new battle front concerns some 50,000 teachers who applied for promotion last year, but who cannot get upgraded because the TSC would require Sh6.6 billion to do against a budgetary allocation of Sh600 million in the 2013/14 financial year.

Further, some 23,000 head teachers and their deputies who have undergone a managerial course will not move up the salary scales despite being promised they would do so from the start.

   Curiously, the TSC says that the managerial course is not an entry point to any of the existing schemes of service for teachers.

Instead, the qualifications gained by these headteachers should only help the TSC to establish a data bank from which to get candidates for managerial positions when they arise in schools. Given that many headteachers are in their late 50s, is this not an attrition ploy?

   But teacher promotion woes did not start with the headteachers and the 50,000 professionals at the centre of the current storm.

For a long time, teacher promotion has been mired in controversy. All through the 1980s and 1990s, promotions of teachers would be done subjectively by the DEOs and the then Provincial Directors of Education.

There are tales of these officials subjecting teachers to callous ordeals like singing the three stanzas of the National Anthem and many others. In fact, many eligible teachers, then as now, dug in and prayed for the occasional cadre promotions where entire job groups are moved up the salary ladder with the minimum fuss than face interview panels. Also helpful have been the rare State-commissioned salary reviews which moved everyone up the scales.

   Like the 50, 000 teachers at the centre of the current clash, thousands more were tricked that they would be promoted upon completion of the Strengthening of Mathematics and Science in Schools (Smase) cycles. But years down the line, nobody ever looks twice at the Smase certificates when teachers produce them at interviews; every other teacher has such papers!

 In the past, District Officers went back to the Kenya School of Administration and came out as District Commissioners. It was not to form a data bank.

Police and military officers go back to Cadet School in a clear programme for upward mobility.

   But unlike other government departments, teachers’ refresher courses have no apparent goal in sight. Often they are held in deplorable conditions of boarding schools where the professionals sleep in their students’ beds and use other boarding facilities available.

So, with so many disjointed courses and each with a false promise of promotion, many teachers have become irredeemable pessimists. Indeed, many of them have taken the only opening available to them by going back to school to pursue undergraduate and masters degrees.

It is because of these frustrations that teachers who attain post-graduate qualifications are steadily shipping out to local tertiary institutions as tutors and lecturers where there are clear promotion channels. When TSC eventually acknowledges that there is haemorrhage of experienced brains from public schools to local colleges and universities, we will have another crises to address. 

Mr Kariuki is a teacher