The Education and Culture Ministry has launched a list of reforms, called merdeka belajar (freedom to learn), which focuses on student performance assessments, classroom teaching plans (RPPs) and school zoning.

The first reform mandates a new form of assessment by which teachers have more autonomy to formulate school final exams, while the second would abolish the national exam, which is considered to be too material-heavy and too light on measuring reasoning skills.

The third reform would simplify RPPs for teachers, meaning less administrative work for teachers so they can have more time to focus on the learning process.

The last reform would modify the zoning system by reducing the number of seats allocated to students residing near each school from 80 to 50 percent, while increasing seats for those with high academic achievements.

All of these policy adjustments would bring us to the heart of education reform, which is teacher competence and professionalism. No matter how great the reform of education, including curriculum restructuring to put it in line with the Industry 4.0 era, all will be futile if teachers have no required competence.

With regard to the first and second reforms, for example, the new form of assessment that would be determined by the teachers obviously needs teachers to have the ability to comprehensively assess progress regarding both cognitive and emotional aspects of their own students.

Hence, teachers need routine and deep individual observation to detect not only their students’ strengths and weaknesses in learning, but also their mental development, talent and interests.

The third reform, RPP simplification, would need teachers to have the ability to think concisely and act practically but with expected high impacts on learning outcomes.

Here, teachers might feel it difficult to engage with this instructional reform as many feel safer in the current comfort zone. The “heavy” administrative work may actually no longer be burdensome, given the saddening routine of “copy-paste” of the RPP in preparing teaching material.

The last reform is relaxation of the zoning system. While it still exercises certain affirmative actions to accommodate students living near the school, it will challenge teachers to create a competitive atmosphere as students with high academic achievement would strive for the best.

Teachers are also expected to be able teach students of various backgrounds, as the zoning system would also accommodate students living near the school regardless of their social backgrounds and academic levels, underlying the importance of compassion and collaboration.

Teacher transformation is indispensable. Nevertheless, numerous studies including that of the World Bank show that teacher certification programs that link lavish pay rises to improvements in qualifications have had little, if any, encouraging effects on teachers’ subject matter and pedagogical skills.

As education scholars have stated, the prime determinants of learning are competency, effectiveness and teacher motivation, which have proved lacking despite the teacher certification programs.

We need to be sure that would-be teachers in teachers’ colleges are well-equipped with both subject knowledge and pedagogical skills. Additionally, we need to upgrade the competency and professionalism of about 3 million existing teachers, many of whom are less than qualified.

Hence, several steps need to be considered.

First, due to the certification program that offers lavish pay for teachers, the teaching profession has become attractive. As a result, now almost 1 million students are studying in teachers’ colleges and about 250,000 college-trained graduates are ready to enter the market, while only about 50,000 teachers are to retire each year. Worse, more than 60 percent of teachers are contract teachers with low salaries and no job security.

Hence, strict control entry into teachers’ colleges is needed to select only the best candidates with the main focus on numeracy and literacy skills, interpersonal skills, motivation to teach and willingness to improve themselves.

Second, continuous professional development should prioritize competencies, not seniority and academic degrees. This is in line with the ministry’s policy of guru penggerak (mover teacher), by which any teacher with high competency may share knowledge and best practices with peers without strict technocratic constraints.

This means government-funded Quality Education Guarantee Institutions, Centers for Teachers and Educational Personnel Development and Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organizations Centers, as well as independent teacher unions, should really function as centers of excellence for upgrading teachers’ competency.

These teachers should be presented with the latest pedagogical innovation and best practices from their peers not only in Indonesia, but also in Southeast Asia and beyond.

Third, careful attention still should be paid to the interchange among competency assessment, performance appraisal and continuous professional development. Likewise, professional development can be continued with information and communication technology to reach the unreachable and connect our millions of teachers in a productive networking of a big digital village.

Massive open online courses, for example, offer a relatively affordable way of scaling up teachers’ knowledge and skills.

Lastly, education reform needs more than just teacher transformation. The political ecosystem should also be reformed in a way that supports the national education system. The fact that almost all matters related to teachers are under the authority of regional governments has proved ineffective for proper national recruitment, deployment and distribution of teachers.

Not to mention the fact that during regional elections teachers are often forced by the incumbents to become vote getters, putting them in a tricky situation that, in many cases, have jeopardized their teaching careers.

Therefore, it is worth considering returning parts of teacher management under the authority of the central government, to ensure teachers can have a proper teaching career with rewarding continuous professional development, to bring about sound student performance.

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Director of Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization, Regional Open Learning Center and lecturer at the School of Education, University of Sultan Ageng Tirtayasa, Serang, Banten

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