With his flagship Indonesian Smart Card (KIP) program, President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo has managed to further expand children’s access to basic education, imitating the success of his predecessors since Soeharto.

The country, however, has achieved little in its attempts to improve its education standards, with most Indonesian children still doing badly in math, science and reading, according to the 2015 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

In 2016, the government, skeptical of the global assessments on the country’s education quality, decided to sponsor a national survey called the Indonesia National Assessment Program (INAP) to counter the 2015 results of PISA .

The result was another reality check for Indonesian education.

PISA found 75.7 percent of Indonesian students to be poor in science, mathematics and reading, while the administration’s INAP showed a slightly lower figure of 73.61 percent.

“Our conclusion was that we had to work harder in preparing our teachers, providing better school facilities and preparing our students,” said Education and Culture Minister Muhadjir Effendy in a recent interview with The Jakarta Post, referring to the INAP results.

The efforts to expand access to education have resulted in a significant increase in Indonesia’s gross school enrollment rates in various education levels between 1972 and 2015. Through programs like KIP, the government hopes that economic constraints will no longer prevent children from attending schools.

But that is not enough, says Totok Amien Sofijanto, an education observer from Paramadina University in Jakarta. “We have to have programs that can improve quality in schools,” he said.

Muhadjir, who replaced Anies Baswedan in 2016, said one major cause of poor learning quality in Indonesia was the long-standing mishandling of teachers.

“Our teachers have become disconnected from teaching standards. For many years, teachers have not been provided with information related to teaching standards,” Muhadjir said.

Teacher reform, in fact, has long been an integral part of the whole education reform, but it has yet to show promising results.

In 2005, the government introduced a teacher-certification program aimed primarily at improving teacher welfare. While the program has increased teacher salaries “considerably over the past decade” it has resulted in no “observable improvements in learning outcomes”, a 2013 study by the World Bank concluded.

“We have to admit that students’ learning outcomes and capability to absorb learning need to be improved and are still far from desirable,” Muhadjir said.

He added, however, that, “the problem of quality and the problem of access to quality education must be addressed separately.”

Muhadjir argued that improving the quality of Indonesian students could not be done solely by his ministry, pointing to the role of local administrations, which have gained a much greater role in policymaking since 1998 through decentralization.

The minister has repeatedly lamented the fact that of the 34 provinces in the country, Jakarta remains the only province to have allocated more than 20 percent of its budget for education.

A recent Lowy Institute study authored by Australian researcher Andrew Rosser, which offers a new theory on why Indonesia’s education is failing, may partly corroborate the minister’s arguments on the need for strong national collaboration to fix national education.

The study acknowledges that low government spending, quality of teachers, discouraging incentive systems and poor government management of public education institutions have hampered efforts to improve education quality, but its author believes that the underlying cause of Indonesia’s failure to create a quality education system is more political and economic in nature.

While the fall of Soeharto led to a clearer division of power between Jakarta and regions, it failed to completely root out the influence of “bureaucratic and corporate forces that dominated the New Order” in sectors including in education, according to the study.

These forces “have had little interest in the development of a high-quality education system producing strong learning outcomes,” it says.

Commenting on the argument, Totok, the Paramadina analyst, said education “ideally must be free from the influence of politics”. The problem, however, was that teachers have been seen as strong political capital, given their large numbers.

“Some 60 percent of our civil servants are teachers. If you look at this large number, this is political capital. You cannot underestimate the power of teachers as a pressure group. That is realpolitik,” Totok said.

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