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Govt mulls recruiting new teachers on contract basis
The government is mulling the idea of recruiting new teachers on a contractual basis instead of hiring them as civil servants
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he government is mulling the idea of recruiting new teachers on a contractual basis instead of hiring them as civil servants. The government hopes that such a shift in policy would encourage new teachers to perform more efficiently and effectively. The new policy comes in response to the feeling that the teacher certification program introduced a decade ago has failed to boost the quality of teachers in Indonesia.
The Culture and Education Ministry said on Tuesday that the new recruitment system could be implemented as early as next year.
'We are proposing a new recruitment system so that new teachers don't always have to be civil servants. A teacher could be recruited on a contractual basis as stipulated by Law No. 5/2014 on the state apparatus,' the ministry's senior advisor for innovation and competitiveness, Ananto Kusuma Seta, told The Jakarta Post.
He said that the ministry had talked to the Administrative and Bureaucratic Reform Ministry on the possibility of implementing the system and that both ministries were preparing a regulation to support the implementation of the new recruitment system.
Under the new system, Ananto argued that teachers would be more motivated to do their best in teaching their students.
'Teachers who perform well will get their contracts extended. When they fail to perform, they will be laid off. So there's an incentive to perform well, like a stick-and-carrot mechanism,' he said.
The new system also aimed to improve the status of honorary teachers, who were employed by schools instead of the government and thus were often underpaid, Ananto added.
In the past decade, the government has shifted its focus from building school infrastructure to increasing the quality of teachers. The government has tried to improve teacher quality through several policies, including the introduction of the certification program.
However, the ministry found that instead of looking to improve their teaching skills, a majority of teachers only participated in certification and specialization programs in order to receive extra benefits as guaranteed to them by the 2005 Teacher and Lecturer Law.
'The aim of the certification program was not to increase the quality of teachers but to improve their welfare, which is why it prioritized teachers who were about to retire so that they could have the chance to enjoy the extra benefits,' education expert Darmaningtyas told the Post on Tuesday.
The certification program resulted in a ballooning government allocation for the remuneration of teachers, reaching Rp 74 trillion (US$5,200) in 2015, more than six times the allocation set aside in 2010.
Against total education spending, professional allowances have increased from 5 percent in 2010 to 17 percent in 2015.
The World Bank's 2014 quantitative study demonstrated that the certification program had not significantly impacted either teacher quality or student learning outcomes. These findings came from a rigorous impact evaluation study conducted in 2009, 2011 and 2012 and involving some 360 schools.
A lack of improvement has also been reflected in Indonesia's results in the last Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). In the assessment, Indonesia ranked 64 out of 65 countries.
'A contract teacher is mostly the same as a tenured teacher. They both have almost the same take home pay. They just operate under a different scheme. Furthermore, under the contractual system, a new teacher could start from a certain grade, while if he or she were to become a tenured teacher, he or she would have to start from the bottom. That's the advantage of becoming a contract teacher,' said Ananto.
Darmaningtyas, however, said that the contractual system would only make teachers restless. 'Managing teachers is different from managing factory laborers, who can be hired on a contractual basis. Becoming a teacher is a long process and a teacher's quality depends on their experience. The contractual system will only make teachers restless in teaching their students,' he said.
Darmaningtyas argued that it was better for the government to improve teacher quality by training teachers at teacher training institutions (LPTKs).
'Existing LPTKs have to be evaluated strictly. The criteria to receive training from a LPTK also has to be tightened,' he said.
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