Education in Indonesia: School’s in

Nguồn tin: nguontinviet.com

WITH roughly 55m students, 3m teachers and more than 236,000 schools in 500 districts, Indonesia has the world’s fourth-largest education system. But the system does not work nearly as well as it should. The country’s new president, Joko Widodo, generally known as Jokowi, hopes to change that with help from his new education secretary, Anies Baswedan, a former university president and creator of a programme that sends graduates to teach in remote areas.

Like so much else in the sprawling archipelago, nothing is simple. Three separate ministries are involved. The education ministry oversees state primary, junior and secondary schools; the religious-affairs ministry has control of madrassas, or Islamic schools; and the president has now made the ministry for research and technology responsible for universities and polytechnics.

Since the 1970s Indonesia has boosted primary and junior-secondary enrolment rates dramatically. In the past decade it has narrowed the gap in school-completion rates between rich and poor students, and between those from rural and urban areas. Since 2009 it has allocated a fifth of its annual budget to education. Yet gains in education have a lot more scope. Whereas primary-enrolment rates in richer districts are close to 100%, in some poorer districts they remain below 60%. Nor are teachers evenly distributed. Mr Baswedan says that if a school is next to a main road, “I can guarantee it has more teachers than it needs. But if it’s two or three kilometres from that road, it won’t have enough.” Across the system enrolment declines markedly with age. Mr Baswedan says Indonesia has 170,000 primary schools, 40,000 junior-secondary schools and just 26,000 high schools.

Boosting educational quality, particularly relative to Indonesia’s neighbours, has been hard. Though average reading and maths scores on standardised PISA tests have improved since 2000, scores in science have declined—and scores in maths and reading have recently been slipping again. In the tests Indonesia markedly lags behind not just rich Singapore, but also Vietnam, whose GDP per capita is three-fifths its own.

The system lets Indonesians down. For every 100 students who enter school, only 25 will come out meeting minimum international standards in literacy and numeracy. In reading, maths and science, the average Indonesian 15-year-old is roughly four years behind the average Singaporean. The education system has also been racked by teacher shortages, and by repeated cheating scandals—including the selling of exam answers. All of these shortcomings matter not just in terms of stunted lives but also for the economy. A recent study from the Boston Consulting Group found that Indonesia faces a dire shortage of managerial talent—an alarming problem for a country with a growing services sector.

In the hope of improving things, a law was introduced in 2005 which required teacher certification. Yet a report this year from the World Bank finds that the certification made no big difference to how much students learned. What matters is how well teachers perform in the classroom, and encouraging students to think critically.

Mr Baswedan wants to start by improving the teachers. He believes they should be evaluated not only on how many hours a week they teach, but on how well their students perform. Almost certainly, teachers need better training. Of more than 400 teacher-training institutes in Indonesia, Mr Baswedan reckons that no more than a tenth are much good. The minister also wants to improve Indonesia’s vocational-training institutes, particularly those in agriculture and fisheries, as a way both to boost the country’s skilled-manufacturing workforce and to help those in rural areas dependent on farming and the sea.

In the presidential race earlier this year, Jokowi campaigned heavily on education. He wasted no time on one of his campaign promises, launching the “Indonesia Smart Card” in November. It provides school fees and stipends to 24m poor students across Indonesia, guaranteeing them 12 years of free education. But the scheme’s value will depend on how well Mr Baswedan can make his longer-term reforms work. Just stuffing more students into bad schools will be of little help to anyone.

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