The Dominican Association of Public Teachers (ADP) has no evidence that the appointments of teachers who won a position in the Teachers’ Competitive Examination are being carried out in violation of the order in which they were qualified in the tests and interviews, as reported in Diario Libre.
Primitiva Medina, second vice-president of the National Executive Committee of the teachers’ union, told Diario Libre that all the presidents of the ADP Sections were given the lists of the applicants and their grades, so that they can be vigilant of the appointments and can notify any variation or violation of the process, following the provisions of Departmental Order 06-2021, which regulated the contest.
She was referring to an audio of the district director of Haina with a complaint that political patronage was prevailing in the hiring, as reported in Diario Libre.
Education Minister Roberto Fulcar insists the appointments of the needed 19,000 public school teachers are being made in the order of the scores obtained in the evaluation process. He said another 10,000 teacher profiles will be left on file for appointing as vacancies happen when a new school is opened, for instance.
Diario Libre reported that in the recently ended competitive public school teacher examination, some 29,567 teachers passed and 41,503 failed the tests of 73,569 who applied.
Those who passed exceeded by more than 10,000 the number of teachers that the institution said are needed to fill the vacant positions. This has led to a situation in which all those who qualified are demanding appointments from the Ministry of Education.
The Ministry of Education says that the teacher appointments are in process at the Ministry of Public Administration (MAPA). To date, 5,000 teachers at the initial level have been processed.
All the appointments will be ready before the end of March 2022, and as they are made, the applicants will be notified.
Private schools complain that many of those who passed were already employed in private schools and will be leaving these posts to work in the many times better-paying public school system in this same school year, causing major problems to the private schools.
Former Minister of Education and Superior Education, Ligia Amada Melo said that the poor training teachers receive in the universities is demonstrated by the Teachers’ Competitive Examination results in which more than half of the applicants failed. She says another way to ensure better teachers is for the universities to be more restrictive when admitting students to the education career.
Read more in Spanish:
Diario Libre
El Dia
El Dia
El Caribe
14 March 2022