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Indonesia Education Lags Behind Region

Krithika Varagur

   JAKARTA, INDONEISA - Indonesian students are among the lowest
   performers in Southeast Asia, according to a recent report, [1]The
   Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), released this
   month by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
   (OECD). Indonesian 15-year-olds ranked in the bottom ten across 79
   surveyed countries in all three subjects under consideration: math,
   reading, and science. The results point to education quality issues in
   the region's most populous country.

   "It's a wake-up call for all of us in the education sector," said Totok
   Amin Soefijanto, a policy expert at Paramadina University in Jakarta.

   Imperfect incentives
   Indonesia's so-called demographic dividend, meaning its proportionally
   large youth population in a country of over 260 million, holds
   considerable potential for economic growth, but it is diminished by its
   low educational achievement to date.

   Poorly qualified teachers are a major problem. Sixty-five percent of
   students surveyed by PISA said their teachers rarely provided direct
   feedback to them. One in five teachers are regularly absent, according
   to the World Bank in 2017. The government has run teacher competency
   tests and in 2015, the average score for the nearly three million
   teachers who took it was 53 percent, according to an analysis by
   [2]University of Melbourne professor Andrew Rosser.

   "We have not repeated the competency assessment since 2015, which I
   think was another one of our mistakes, because if we don't measure
   this, we don't know where their skills are decreasing," said
   Soefijanto.

   Indonesian teachers also face chronically low salaries and are often
   appointed on the basis of cronyism or favor-trading, according to
   Rosser, which further decreases their competency.

References

   1. https://www.oecd.org/pisa/publications/pisa-2018-results.htm
   2. https://www.lowyinstitute.org/publications/beyond-access-making-indonesia-s-education-system-work

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