With Money in Hands, Will We Have Better Teachers?

Finance Minister Sri Mulyani’s announcement that the budget for education will be increased to 600 trillion IDR this year, or the highest in Indonesian history, has generated a new hope that the government will finally boost the quality of the country’s teachers, notoriously known for their low skills and knowledge, and accordingly will raise their salary.

Education in Indonesia has inherited teachers with low capability and mentality. Some teachers are often absent from class while some do not have an adequate mastery of the subject, materials and pedagogy required to guide increasingly active and globalized students in an increasingly competitive environment. Others are too lazy or too tired to teach and only give homework or ask students to just write the materials without being bother to even explaining it first.

When Covid-19 pandemic hit Indonesia, for instance, all of classes were forced to go online and use internet and digital devices. It seemed that most teachers didn’t know how to use such devices. Meanwhile, the government have not prepared adequate facilities and infrastructure to provide training, or teacher quality improvement programs.

Sri Mulyani said big parts of the budget would be used to improve the quality of the sector’s human resources who can be competitive at the global level. The budget is divided into three big chunks. The biggest part, 305 trillion rupiah will be transferred to the regions to finance the school’s operations there. The second part, 233.9 trillion rupiah, is for a program called “Smart Indonesia”. The last chunk or 69.5 trillion rupiah will be kept as education endowment fund.

While funding is a big issue, it is not the only problems in the sector. It will still be a huge challenge for the government, especially the Ministry of Education itself, to solve the low quality and capability of the sector’s human resources.

UNESCO in its 2016 Global Education Monitoring (GEM) reports, for instance, ranks Indonesian teacher quality in the dead last, or at 14^th out of 14 developing countries surveyed in the world. Meanwhile, out of 3,9 million teachers nationwide, 25% of them are not academically qualified, and 52% of the teachers have not been certified to teach.

As teachers play a crucial – if not the most crucial – role in facilitating and motivating students to study, be creative and innovative, their quality directly reflect the students’ quality. The low quality of teacher means low quality of students.

The OECD’s Programme for International Students Assessment (PISA), a triennial survey of 15-year-old students that focuses on the student’s proficiency in reading, mathematics and science, ranks Indonesian students at 72th out of 77 countries tested, far below Singapore, Brunei Darussalam, and Malaysia.

In this regard, Indonesia should not look far but learn from its closest neighbor, Singapore, a country with one of the best education systems globally. Singapore with a number of populations of only 5 million people ranks number 2 in the world in PISA test, behind China only.

In fact, Indonesian officials have been familiar with the neighbor’s education system. An official at the Indonesian Embassy there, for instant, told media recently that the country implemented a centralized education policy with its ministry of education (MoE) as a central. The ministry stipulated national education goal, curriculum, national examination, education guidelines, teacher professional development, and the recruitment teachers and education staff.

The National Institute of Education (NIE) is the teacher training centre have close ties and establish cooperation with MoE, and schools. Recruitment process, teacher training, and teacher’s professional development always involving that three parties. Singapore has shown seriousness and commitment toward the quality of education and best results since the earliest steps – from recruitment of teacher candidate, teacher employment and professional training of teacher.

This year’s budget of 600 trillion rupiah is an increase of around 20 percent of the last year’s budget of 500 trillion, or a spike of 100 trillion rupiah. We hope that the biggest part of this 100 trillion-rupiah increase will be used for programs to educate and train the country’s teachers so that they can teach students properly, equipping students to compete at the regional, if not, global levels. Catching up the quality of other countries in the region.

Once again Indonesia has the opportunity to solve the fundamental problems of its education after decades of obscurity. We hope the money can be used to establish good quality of teacher education so that the manpower inputs to education system can be boosted. The money can also be used to fix recruitment of teacher candidates and teacher’s professional training

Now, it’s a matter of political willingness. We hope our decision makers do not screw it up this time.