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Teacher quality may hold back Nadiem’s reforms
Nadiem’s policy emphasizes the role of teachers in improving the quality of education, but in fact, not all teachers are ready for the great responsibility.
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Teachers help students to use smartphones to prepare for a mathematics competition at SMK 1 Leuwiliang state vocational school in Bogor, West Java, on Tuesday. (The Jakarta Post/Dhoni Setiawan)
E
ducation and Culture Minister Nadiem Makarim has planned four reforms in compulsory education, which try to reduce state control and give more autonomy to teachers and schools, a move that is feared to worsen the quality gap across provinces.
Observers said the reforms, which will affect schools from elementary to high school level, may not be suitable for the country, in which teachers are not equally educated nor equally paid.
Nadiem’s list of reforms, called Merdeka Belajar (Freedom to Learn), focuses on student performance assessments, classroom teaching plans (RPP) and school zoning.
The first reform mandates a new form of assessment that can be determined by teachers in each school to replace the current final school exams (USBN), while the second sets to abolish the national exam (UN), which is deemed to test students on too much material, while being very poor at evaluating reasoning skills.
The third reform will simplify RPPs for teachers, requiring them to do less paperwork to describe their classroom plans and spend more time developing and evaluating the learning process with their students.
The last reform will change the current zoning system that has regulated school admissions since 2017. It will decrease the number of seats allocated to students who live near each school from 80 to 50 percent, while increasing seats for those with high academic achievement to 30 percent.
Education expert Totok Amin Soefijanto of Paramadina University said Nadiem’s policy emphasized the role of teachers in improving the quality of education, but in fact, not all teachers were ready for the great responsibility.
