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Pandemic to take big toll on students' test scores, learning, future earnings: Studies
The COVID-19 pandemic is estimated to have pushed some 90,000 children out of school in Indonesia as a result of the first four months of school closures.
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Two children watch digital learning videos from home in Bandung, West Java, on March 17, 2020. President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo stressed that policies for work, study and worship at home needed to be implemented to reduce the spread of COVID-19. (Antara/M Agung Rajasa)
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ens of thousands of Indonesian students have dropped out of school, may see their international test scores drop by double-digits and are likely to lose hundreds of dollars in future earnings as mobility restrictions and the economic crunch hits educational activities, several studies have found.
With the pandemic hitting household finances, it is estimated that 43,031 children at the elementary school level and 48,175 children at the secondary level were forced to abandon their studies in the first four months of campus closures, mainly because their parents needed them to support the family’s income, according to a World Bank study published in August last year.
Meanwhile, Indonesia’s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) reading score is estimated to drop by 11 points to 360 after the pandemic from 371 in the latest assessment in 2018, according to the same study. Reading was the main subject assessed in the 2018 PISA.
“This is important because as we know from international studies and from Indonesian studies that children exposed to early childhood education perform better over the whole education cycle,” Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) economist Andrea Goldstein said on March 18, quoting the bank’s study during a virtual press conference.
He added that while Indonesia had shown improvements in terms of access to education, the country still needed to further develop its quality of education.
Read also: In Indonesia, sizeable budget not translating into quality education: Report
During the pandemic, almost half of the Indonesian students that dropped out of school did so to find work and help their family make ends meet as the parents’ incomes shrank amid soaring job losses and business closures, according to the World Bank. Many parents also struggled to keep up with school-related payments.
