A nation’s future of sustained economic growth depends very
much on the quality of its human resources, and this is determined by the
quality of education.
Studies have also shown that education is a crucial factor
in reducing income inequality, as can be seen in many Latin American countries.
Investment in a nation’s education takes 10 to 15 years for a country to reap
the benefits.
Since 2008, thanks to a constitutional amendment, spending
on education has been set at 20 percent of the total budget.
The budget for education in 2013 is nearly U$6 billion,
which makes education one of the top seven recipients of state budget funds.
Currently, there are approximately 59 million students, 3 million teachers and
330,000 schools.
So what does the Education and Culture Ministry do with a
whopping $6 billion? Education and Culture Minister Mohammad Nuh, said in
February this year that in 2007, 80 percent of the children who entered primary
school graduated, but out of this number only 61 percent continued on to junior
high.
The minister went on to say that, of those who did enter
junior high school, only 48 percent completed this stage of schooling and of
this number only 21 percent continued to senior high.
Of this 21 percent, only 10 percent graduated. Of the 10
percent who graduated, only 1.4 percent undertook tertiary education.
It was safe for the minister to talk about numbers in 2007,
it was six years ago and a long time before he became education and culture
minister.
During the last decade, primary education enrolment rates
have been impressive.
There is, however, more to education than just enrolment!
Has the proportion of drop-outs also decreased dramatically since 2007?
Given that we are entering a demographic bonus, where there
will be a large number of youths, which should be able to fuel our economic
growth, have the enrolments produced a workforce that is now developing our
economy?
A report released by the World Bank in March this year
entitled Spending More or Spending Better: Improving Education Financing in
Indonesia finds that, despite the large increase in education spending, the
quality has not improved.
According to the report, Indonesia’s performance in
international tests has been disappointing; in fact, the country’s general
scores were at the bottom of international assessments of learning
achievements.
Apparently, when eighth grade Indonesian students were
tested through Trends in International Mathematics and Science Studies (TIMSS),
which is an international benchmark for mathematics and science, they performed
significantly worse than students from Thailand and Malaysia.
The TIMSS test showed that not only are average scores low
but that the share of students achieving the highest levels of performance is
also very small, with only the top 20 percent of performers in Indonesia
achieving at least an intermediate score.
Only 3 percent achieved scores at the highest level and no
students scored at the advanced level. In contrast, almost 50 percent of
students in Thailand and Malaysia achieved at least the intermediate level,
while 10 percent achieved high benchmarks and 1 percent achieved advanced
levels.
The results show that average scores in 2003 and 2009 are
not statistically very different in mathematics and science. Only reading
scores improved. Even more worrying is the fact that, when researchers broke
down results by socio-economic deciles, the inequality in access to quality
education was glaringly obvious.
There was a significant difference in performance between
the richest and poorest students in mathematics. Poor students performed
significantly worse than rich students, and this difference has not improved
since 2003.
So, where did all the money go? The same report found that a
large share of the massive increase went to pay teachers’ salaries and
teachers’ certification allowances.
The increase in spending on salaries was driven by a fast
increase in the total number of teachers, which continues to increase despite
Indonesia already having one of the lowest student-teacher ratios in the world.
The teacher certification program almost doubled the pay of
certified teachers through an allowance equivalent to a teacher’s basic pay.
This allowance absorbed more than 2 percent of the state budget in 2009, even
though only 30 percent of teachers were certified.
It is convenient to blame decentralization. One intrinsic
problem is the attitude of our bureaucracy to the notion of public service.
There is even rejection among much of the bureaucracy of the basic principle
that the main task of civil servants is to serve the community that pays their
wages.
Bureaucrats have been smart in serving whoever their masters
are, so that their privileges as civil servants remain intact. With this
framework of thinking, it is easy to see how budgets are used mainly for
operational costs rather than servicing the community.
Political elites must agree to stop playing politics with
education and to take education out of the political horse trading that takes
place when new cabinets are formed.
The minister in charge needs to be competent and not
politically well connected just because a political party was promised the job
for agreeing to be in the government’s coalition. This approach has cost us
dearly!
We have a Master Plan for Acceleration and Expansion of
Indonesian Economic Development (MP3EI), so why not have a Master Plan for
Acceleration and Expansion of Indonesian Educational Development?
Indonesia needs bridges and roads, but if we are to develop
our economy, we desperately need skilled human resources. If we can plan
infrastructure building for the next 15 years, why can we not do it for
education when so much depends on it?
If not, we will be importing doctors and engineers and continuing
to export migrant workers (TKI).
Ratih Hardjono ;
A
Former Journalist, Secretary-General of the Indonesian Community for Democracy
(KID); She was a recipient of the Nieman Fellowship for Journalism at Harvard
University, in the class of 1994
JAKARTA
POST, 16 Juli 2013
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