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Teachers welcome education reform plans, but devil in details
Education and Culture Minister Nadiem Makarim’s recently announced Merdeka Belajar (Freedom to Learn) reform has been largely well received by educators — but teachers and their unions say more guidance is needed and the changes should go further than currently proposed
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span>Education and Culture Minister Nadiem Makarim’s recently announced Merdeka Belajar (Freedom to Learn) reform has been largely well received by educators — but teachers and their unions say more guidance is needed and the changes should go further than currently proposed.
Three of the four changes planned by Nadiem — replacing the final school exams (USBN), abolishing the national exam (UN) and simplifying classroom teaching plans (RPP) — are aimed at reducing teacher’s administrative burden while giving them more freedom, as well as responsibility in assessing students.
Kristoforus Djarot, a teacher at SMP 10 state junior high school in Komba, East Manggarai regency, East Nusa Tenggara (NTT), said the changes were needed to ensure teachers kept up with the times.
“As a teacher I have to start thinking and reading more, so that I can implement the reforms in my teaching,” he said. “This policy will open the eyes of educators to the need to adapt to current and future developments.”
But given the uneven distribution of qualified teachers among regions and the fact that more than 200,000 teachers nationwide do not even have a bachelor’s degree, observers and practitioners say clear guidelines and training were needed to ensure the success of the Merdeka Belajar initiative.
Federation of Indonesian Teachers Associations secretary-general Heru Purnomo said that, while the reforms seemed good on paper, many details needed to be ironed out in their implementation.
“We like the fact that the minister has announced these reforms, and we have wanted those changes for a long time because the current system has not resulted in quality learning for students,” Heru told The Jakarta Post on Monday. “But what’s needed now from the government is seriousness. Our concern is that after all this fanfare, the reforms will not be carried out in full.”
Teachers have long bemoaned the paperwork needed to create RPPs, for example, and welcomed Nadiem’s plan to simplify them.
“One RPP can be up to 30 pages,” said Dwi Hidayati, a biology teacher at SMP 4 state junior high school in Balikpapan, East Kalimantan. “And that’s just for one class.”
However, Heru said clear rules needed to be put in place to put everyone on the same page regarding the simplified RPP.
“According to the demands of the 21st century, teachers’ lesson plans should be geared toward higher-order thinking skills [HOTS]. Not all teachers even understand what HOTS are, let alone implement them in class,” he said, citing the fact that fewer than 30 percent of Indonesian schools met the minimum service standards for education in 2017.
Teacher quality has long been cited as a major obstacle in improving the country’s education system and despite a myriad of training and certification programs, both at the national and regional level, there has been little evidence of improvement.
Itje Chodijah, an education observer, said the programs’ lack of results could be traced back to their “one size fits all” nature.
“A curriculum from Jakarta is expected to be useful to teachers everywhere, from Bandung [in West Java] to Waingapu [in NTT],” she told the Post. “Teachers will take the certification, because it gives them financial benefits, but it often has little impact on their students.”
She said that, to best implement the reforms, regional administrations had to quickly identify how many teachers they needed in each school and the central government should create a module-based training system that allowed teachers to choose modules according to their needs.
“Teachers actually already know what is needed in their classrooms, but if the higher-ups mandate something else, they will just follow along,” she said.
Indonesian Teachers Association chairman M. Ramli Rahim, on the other hand, said the Merdeka Belajar reforms did not go far enough.
“The changes are far too narrow to […] create freedom in learning,” he said.
Ramli said that, while simplifying RPPs was a good thing, there were many more administrative tasks for teachers to do, to the detriment of their focus on their students.
He acknowledged that teacher quality was still low overall, but added that haphazard recruitment processes and low pay meant it was hardly fair to expect much more from teachers.
“Contract teachers in certain regions make as little as Rp 100,000 [US$7] a month,” Ramli said. “What kind of quality can you expect from someone making Rp 100,000 a month?”
Ramli added that, to really improve learning quality, more radical changes to the curriculum were needed.
“Right now schools teach 14 subjects, which means that some teachers are only in the classroom six hours a week. We propose that the number of subjects be limited to five in junior high school and six in high school,” Ramli said. “So, much greater changes are needed. The question is whether Nadiem is brave enough to make those changes.”
