By Harry Achillini on 08:39 pm Aug 20, 2014
http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/opinion/jokowi-can-keep-election-promises-education-reform/
As Indonesia enters a transition period before Joko Widodo takes power in October, people across the country wait anxiously to see how election promises will translate into concrete action. Jokowi, as the president-elect is better known, was voted into office on the back of promises to represent those who have been neglected by previous governments. Nowhere is the need for this promise to be delivered greater than in an education sector characterized by huge disparities — between rural and urban, rich and poor, peripheral and central.
In spite of rapid progress in increasing children’s access to basic education during the presidency of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, millions of school-age children are still out of the classroom. And it is children from poorer, rural and remote areas who are most likely to be out of school. Unicef reports that children from the poorest households are four times more likely to be out of school than those from the richest households. Similarly, nearly 3 percent of children in rural areas are out of school, compared to 1 percent of children from urban areas.
Quality, too, tends to be significantly lower in more disadvantaged areas. Junior high school-level national exam results in Papua and East Nusa Tenggara — where the majority of the population lives in rural areas and poverty levels remain high — are among the lowest in Indonesia. High rates of teacher absenteeism in rural areas continue to leave children without a teacher, especially in the most remote parts of the country. Teachers’ preference for posts in urban areas has also led to a quality gap, with fewer and less prepared teachers holding posts in rural parts of the country.
While the size of these gaps and the impact they have on the education received by children from more disadvantaged groups are staggering, some progress has been made in recent years. The government has implemented a number of key policies since Suharto’s fall that provide greater support for schools in more disadvantaged areas. The School Operational Assistance (BOS) program has significantly increased funds available to schools in disadvantaged areas. This has had substantial impact on enrolment. The establishment of combined, one-roof primary and junior secondary schools is intended to further improve enrolment rates, especially in remote areas.
Improving quality has also been a target. As part of the process of teacher certification, certified teachers assigned to disadvantaged areas are granted allowances that effectively triple their salaries.
The impact of these reforms, however, has been varied. And some flagship policies, such as teacher certification, are yet to have a major impact on quality.
Facing disparities similar to those in Indonesia, Vietnam has turned to the Escuela Nueva model. Escuela Nueva is an educational model originally developed in the 1970s in Colombia in response to low primary school completion rates in marginalized rural areas. The model identified making learning enjoyable, participative and relevant to daily life as key to keeping these children in school and ensuring that, once in school, they are learning.
Often implemented in multi-grade classrooms, Escuela Nueva transforms the role of the teacher from lecturer to facilitator. Students mainly work individually or in groups, observing, thinking and writing answers to the problems set. Students discuss and compare their work with peers and the examples in their learning guides, turning to the teacher only when they have difficulty in solving the problems themselves. Learning guides tend to be based on the national curriculum, but the inclusion of local content, which relates to local life, is recommended.
Strong relationships between the school and the community are a central feature of the Escuela Nueva model. Students and teachers work together to create resources such as community maps and agricultural calendars to help the teacher better understand the condition of the communities in which they teach. Such resources enable the teacher to better adapt lessons and extracurricular activities. Parents and other community members are expected to participate in school activities and to contribute to the improvement of the school environment.
As a result of the introduction of the model in the 1970s and its rapid expansion across Colombia in the 1980s and 1990s, attendance, transition and completion rates in rural Colombian schools shot up. As a quality-focused intervention to keep children in school, Escuela Nueva also had a significant impact on academic achievement. By the late 1990s Unicef declared Colombia to offer the best primary education to children in rural areas in all of Latin America, after Cuba.
The government of Vietnam has rolled out the Escuela Nueva model in all 63 provinces, after a pilot in 24 primary schools in 6 provinces. The initiative is supported by the World Bank and a $84.6 million grant from the Global Partnership for Education.
Although impressive, the Escuela Nueva model may not be the best solution to the problems in Indonesia’s education system. In fact, several initiatives similar to Escuela Nueva, such as the integrated village schools in Papua, which have sprung up across Indonesia, may be more appropriate. But, for the incoming government, matching Vietnam’s commitment to deliver quality education to all and the willingness to embrace successful innovation will be key to keeping election promises to make things better for those who remain marginalized.
Harry Achillini is a researcher at Strategic Asia. He can be contacted at