The Political Economy of Educational Quality and Learning Outcomes in Indonesia

• In Event: Political economy research to improve systems of education: perspectives from the RISE program

Proposal

Over the past few decades, Indonesia has made great strides in improving access to education. Indonesian children are starting school earlier and staying in school longer than they ever have before. But the country has made relatively little progress in improving educational quality and learning outcomes. Assessments of the country’s education system suggest that it is beset by poor quality instruction, poor learning outcomes, inadequate facilities, and disciplinary problems. The country’s results in international standardised assessments of student achievement have been poor relative to other countries including in Southeast Asia. In December 2014, the then Minister of Education and Culture, Anies Baswedan, declared publicly that the country’s educational performance was so poor and violence within the school system so widespread that the country faced an education “emergency”. Conventional analyses — particularly those produced by international development organisations such as the World Bank, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) — have attributed the poor quality of Indonesia’s education system and its difficulties in improving learning outcomes to its proximate causes: inadequate funding, human resource deficits, perverse incentive structures, and poor management. They have accordingly recommended that the Indonesian government increase education funding, improve teacher training, and reform education administration. By contrast, this paper draws on historical and political economy analysis. It argues that Indonesia's poor education performance has not simply been a matter of low public spending on education, human resource deficits, perverse incentive structures, and bad management. It has, at its root, been a matter of politics and power. Specifically, it has reflected the dominance of predatory political, bureaucratic, and corporate elites during the New Order and their continued control over the state apparatus in the post-New Order period, including the education bureaucracy and public educational institutions. It has also reflected the fact that popular elements such as progressive NGOs and parent, teacher, and student groups have had greater opportunity to participate in education policy-making since the fall of the New Order, enabling them to stymie education policy reform. Change in the quality of Indonesia's education system thus depends on a shift in the balance of power between competing coalitions that have a stake in the nature of education policy and its implementation.

Authors

• Andrew Rosser, University of Melbourne

• Agus Suwignyo, Universitas Gadjah Mada