Teachers angry at minister over exam announcement

JAKARTA: Teachers in Yogyakarta are enraged by National Education Minister Muhammad Nuh’s surprise media announcement about results of the recent national remedial exams, which shows that local high school students were doing the poorest.

Questioning the minister’s motive, they dismissed the announcement as “too early” because the official date had been set for June 12.   

“It could be the minister’s trick to gain popularity and we teachers feel we have been despised,” said Petrus Lada Rigo, the principal of Gadjah Mada High School and a member of the Indonesian Independent Teachers Forum’s advisory council.  

Suharyanto, principal of Maarif High School in Yogyakarta said he could not understand why Nuh made an early announcement in the media when the set date was almost two weeks away. It’s possible that more regions are yet to submit their reports.

“Many students asked me why the announcement came that early and I couldn’t explain it either,” he said as quoted by kompas.com.  

Nuh said Monday that Yogyakarta, dubbed the “city of students”, topped the list of students who failed the repeat national exams involving 150,410 students. Of the 11,814 who failed, 21.4 percent were from Yogyakarta. — JP