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Blame game begins as students flop
Various stakeholders have started a round of finger pointing at teachers and students to say who’s to blame for the rising number of high school students failing their final examinations
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arious stakeholders have started a round of finger pointing at teachers and students to say who’s to blame for the rising number of high school students failing their final examinations.
City Council deputy speaker Inggard Joshua said low quality teachers were to blame for the failure.
“Don’t blame the students. It’s all the fault of the teachers,” deputy speaker Inggard Joshua said on Wednesday.
The education agency reported that 5,610 high school students failed their final exams this year, higher than the 1,979 students in 2009.
The number of vocational high school students failing the exams also soared to 5,069 this year, as compared to 1,999 last year.
These figures bring Jakarta’s graduation rate down to 90.7 percent out of the total of 60,135 students sitting final exams, or slightly higher than the national graduation rate of 89.8 percent. Last year, the graduation rate was 95.8 percent.
Inggard said the City Education Agency should immediately pinpoint schools with high failure rates, then evaluate teachers and teaching techniques to spot the mistakes.
“We should be ashamed of the graduation rate in Jakarta, which is lower than that in West Java or East Java although our teachers get higher remuneration and have better school facilities,” he said.
He also highlighted reports from the National Education Ministry that there were 10 high schools in Jakarta where all students failed the exams.
“If that failure involved private high schools, the City Education Agency should downgrade those schools,” he said. “Or, if the agency finds this failure in state high schools it should fire the principals.”
However, some teachers insisted that they should not be the only ones held responsible for such failures.
Retno Listyarti, chairwoman of the Jakarta Teachers Forum, admitted that some teachers could not teach well.
“But, we cannot attribute the lower graduation rate only to the capacity of the teachers to teach,” said Retno, a teacher at state high school SMA 13 in North Jakarta.
“This is not only about the teachers, but it is more about a poorly-managed training system [which jeopardizes teacher quality],” Retno added.
Retno lamented that many training courses for teachers had allegedly become projects whereby bureaucrats could amass revenue.
Meanwhile, Deputy Governor Prijanto said that the result was disappointing.
However, he refused to point his finger at anyone, saying that it would be premature to make judgements.
“I haven’t received a thorough assessment and evaluation on the final exams from the City Education Agency.
I will wait for the report from the agency’s head,” he referred to the agency’s head Taufik Yudi Mulyanto.
Meanwhile, Governor Fauzi Bowo said students failing the exams still had chances to make amends as they could resit the second exams from May 10-14.
