Education and Culture Minister Nadiem Makarim has planned four reforms in compulsory education, in an attempt to reduce state control and give more autonomy to teachers and schools, a move that is feared will 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 (RPPs) 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 will abolish the national exam (UN), which is believed 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 reduce 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.

He said only small groups of teachers were ready for the change and most of them were teachers in Java, Bali and some in Sumatra and Sulawesi. Those in Kalimantan and eastern Indonesia did not yet have the required skills to implement the reforms, he said.

Totok said half of the 3 million teachers in Indonesia did not have a bachelor’s degree and had not been certified. In terms of professional and scientific requirements, their pedagogy quality is still “not good”, while in fact the core process of education is pedagogy.

“Focus on teachers, teachers and teachers, there is no other way. If we are too busy with facilities and tools [of education] there will be no significant effect on education quality,” Totok told The Jakarta Post on Saturday.

A recent report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) triennial survey shows that Indonesian students are among the lowest in science, reading and mathematics compared to their peers in other countries. Out of 79 assessed countries, Indonesia ranked 73rd in mathematics, 74th in reading and 71st in science.

The report shows a drop in the performance of Indonesian students in the three areas assessed, with the reading score experiencing the greatest fall.

Despite already being considered a country with “high” human development, in the United Nations Development Program’s Human Development Report this year, Indonesia ranks 111th out of 189 countries, sharing the position with Samoa. In Southeast Asia, the country is behind Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines.

The report, which has observed the progress of global human development across countries since 1990, also recorded slower growth of the Human Development Index (HDI) score for Indonesia in the past decade. The HDI score grew at 0.74 percent annually between 2010 and 2018, decreasing from 1.4 percent annually from 1990 to 2000.

These setbacks in education have occurred despite 20 percent of the annual state budget having been allocated to education for the past 15 years, as well as salary increases for teachers through a certification program.

The national exams, although much blamed for causing depression among students and parents, have also shown that poor education performance and the quality gap across provinces persist despite the government’s policies.  

Results of the 2019 national exams for high school revealed that scores in all four subjects tested are still disappointing, with students performing the worst in math and natural science. The average score for math increased slightly from 43.32 in 2018 to 45.52, while the average natural science score slightly increased from 47.43 in 2018 to 47.77.

Indonesia’s eastern provinces also still suffer from low average scores. West Sulawesi recorded the lowest average score at 44.4 and West Nusa Tenggara is in the second-lowest at 45.2.

“The biggest challenge of human resources development in Indonesia is not teachers’ work overload, but the educators’ low competence. It’s really unfortunate that [Minister Nadiem] did not address this situation first,” education expert Indra Charismiadji of the Center for Education Regulations and Development Analysis, said.

Nadiem said he actually shared these concerns, but he said people should not underestimate the ability of teachers.  

“Freedom to learn is freedom to think. And it has to start with teachers. Without them having the chance to reflect and interpret [the learning process], how can we assess their competence?” he said.   

The former chief executive officer of Indonesian tech giant Gojek said what the teachers had been doing was only “administrative work”, as they just spent class time teaching the material in the curriculum and the RPPs.

“They should find their own way to teach the curriculum materials and transfer the knowledge to students,” he said.

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