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PISA result puts demographic bonus in doubt
Indonesia’s declining scores in a recent global education quality survey has raised doubts about whether the country would be able to take full advantage of its highly flaunted demographic bonus, which was supposed to provide an abundance of young and productive people in the next decade
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Indonesia’s declining scores in a recent global education quality survey has raised doubts about whether the country would be able to take full advantage of its highly flaunted demographic bonus, which was supposed to provide an abundance of young and productive people in the next decade.
The triennial survey, the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), run by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), showed that Indonesia suffered a decline in all three assessed abilities in 2018, with reading experiencing the greatest drop from 397 to 371.
Mathematics also saw a decline from 386 to 379 and science from 403 to 396. All the scores were below OECD’s average scores of 487 for reading and mathematics and 489 for science.
The survey was carried out on 15-year-old students in 79 countries and territories, including 12,098 students from 397 schools across Indonesia. The figure represented Indonesia’s 3.7 million students who are aged 15 years.
These scores put Indonesia within the ninth-lowest rank in each assessed ability, placing it below four other Southeast Asian countries, namely Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei Darussalam and Thailand.
Education expert Totok Amin Soefijanto of Paramadina University said the government would have to reform its education system if it wanted to make the best use of the demographic dividend. He said it should start by equipping teachers with more training and preservice preparation, including by reforming the recruitment process.
“Our children are being taught by teachers who are never trained and whose knowledge is never updated. As a result, their delivery and content is also not updated, so it’s no wonder that our PISA scores declined,” he said.
The PISA report revealed that 60 percent of Indonesian students felt their Indonesian language teachers had never or seldom directly helped them when they had difficulties learning or changed the teaching material according to the students’ needs. In addition, 65 percent of them said their teachers rarely gave them feedback.
This resulted in a decline of the number of students passing the minimum competency for reading, from 30 percent to 25 percent of respondents. This means that seven out of every 10 15-year-olds in the country could only identify routine information from short passages and simple procedures.
The OECD findings concurred with an earlier World Bank study revealing 35 percent of Indonesian children were unable to read and understand a simple story by age 10.
The high rate of this inability — defined by the World Bank as “learning poverty” — is usually a clear indication that a school system is not properly organized to help children acquire fundamental skills. Without foundational learning, students often fail to thrive later in school or when they join the workforce.
At 35 percent, the World Bank said Indonesia’s learning poverty rate was better than the average of 53 percent among low- and middle-income countries but was significantly worse than the regional average of 21 percent.
Both studies have also highlighted a steep rise of student enrollment in the country. The 2018 PISA country note for Indonesia said that “[the PISA scores] must be seen in the context of the vast strides that Indonesia has made in increasing enrollment”. Enrollment of 15-year-olds to senior and junior high schools saw a spike from 39 percent in 2000 to 85 percent in 2018.
However, with the poor learning abilities shown in the studies, it is apparent that improving access to education in the country has yet to produce fruitful results for the quality of human resources.
Indonesian Teachers Alliance (IGI) chairman Muhammad Ramli Rahim said that the Education and Culture Ministry should learn from these failures to accelerate education reform in the country, starting with the improvement of teachers’ competency and budget efficiency.
“The training of teachers and school principals that has been run by the ministry should be evaluated because it tends to waste the funds without any real results as seen by Indonesia’s education, which is going nowhere, at least as shown by the PISA results,” he said.
Education and Culture Minister Nadiem Makarim said that the results provided useful information by emphasizing the importance of improved competencies and education qualities to better prepare students for the challenges of the 21st century.
