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RI needs to improve education to sustain growth
Indonesia needs to duplicate educational policies and practices from Asian peers China and Vietnam to improve its education system, which could in turn help sustain economic growth, the World Bank has advised
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ndonesia needs to duplicate educational policies and practices from Asian peers China and Vietnam to improve its education system, which could in turn help sustain economic growth, the World Bank has advised.
A recently published World Bank report, “Growing Smarter: Learning and Equitable Development in East Asia and the Pacific”, shows that in the past 50 years, several economies in the region, home to one quarter of the world’s school-age children, or around 331 million, have been able to transform themselves by continuously upgrading knowledge, skills and workforce abilities.
The global lender highlighted that successful learning outcomes were not limited to rich countries.
Up to 40 percent of the children were exposed to good school systems that put them ahead of peers from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, while 60 percent were in poorly performing school systems.
In international assessments for math, science and reading, known as PISA, students from poorer households in middle-income countries, namely Vietnam and China, scored above the OECD average.
“[Vietnam and China] are doing better than one would predict given their level of income. […] Not just a high average, it is an equitable outcome across people from different backgrounds,” World Bank senior economist Amer Hasan told The Jakarta Post in an exclusive interview in Jakarta last week.
By contrast, test scores showed that students in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand were more than three years behind their top-performing counterparts in the region.
Hasan attributed Vietnam’s and China’s success in producing excellent learning outcomes to the consistent implementation of five key policies — ensuring basic conditions for learning are available in entire schools, focusing effective and equity-minded public spending on basic education, making sure children are ready for school, selecting teachers and supporting them throughout their careers and assessing students to diagnose issues.
He said Indonesia could learn and apply these aspects to improve its education system.
Indonesia, the world’s fourth-most populous country with around 260 million people, saw its Human Development Index (HDI) for 2015 settle at 0.689, ranking 113th out of 188 countries and territories measured by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
Last week, President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo revealed a plan to engage local banks to provide student loans to allow young people to pursue higher education.
For 2018, the government has earmarked 20 percent of the state budget, equal to Rp 444 trillion (US$32.41 billion), for education, up from Rp 416 trillion last year.
Despite the significant portion of the budget going to education — which is similar to that of Vietnam — Indonesia has yet to see observable gains in learning outcomes.
Hendarman, who leads the Center for Analysis and Synchronization of Policies at the Education and Culture Ministry, said decentralization had created enormous challenges for the central government in enhancing the school system.
“With decentralization, local regulations are often stronger than ministerial regulations,” he said, reasoning that because of this set-up, the central government had a hard time ensuring all regulations were well implemented at the district level.
The international financial institution emphasized that one way to solve the problem at the district level was to support teachers throughout their careers to enable them to focus on teaching, and to be more selective in picking candidates to become teachers.
In Indonesia, a successful educational model has been applied in Gorontalo, North Sulawesi, in which high-performing teachers are relocated to low-performing schools — often in villages — to support an equitable distribution of learning quality.
