[Kabar-indonesia] 'Indonesian Education' highlights problem of teacher-bureaucrats

[Joyo at aol.com]

The Jakarta Post 
Sunday, July 2, 2006

'Indonesian Education' highlights problem of teacher-bureaucrats

Arya B. Gaduh, Contributor, Jakarta

Indonesian Education: Teachers, Schools, and Central Bureaucracy Christopher 
Bjork New York and London: Routledge, 2005 200 pp.

Asked why Finland has the best education system in the world, one Finnish 
principal reportedly replied: "Teachers, teachers, teachers." Reading Christopher 
Bjork's valuable little book, it is easy to see how this reply could be 
applied to easily explain Indonesia's dismal education performance.

Indonesian Education is an account of how school-based actors respond to 
central government's policy to decentralize education that began in early 1990s. 
However, Bjork uses this account to explain something broader that, at first 
glance, seems trivial: The way Indonesian teachers frame their professional 
responsibilities.

For most people, it is obvious that a teacher's professional responsibility 
is to teach. But this was not what Bjork found on his visits.

"From campus after campus, teachers displayed a remarkably casual attitude 
toward their instructional duties. Yet most schools' employees displayed great 
seriousness towards school rituals." (p. xiv) This puzzled him.

So he decided to spend more than a year in late 1990s Malang observing six 
junior high schools (SMPs) -- public, private and religious. He interviewed 
principals and teachers, observed instructions at the back of classrooms, and hung 
around the teachers' offices.

The result is a dense description of the environment that most Indonesian 
teachers must face -- and clues to solving his puzzle.

He found one of these clues in history. The New Order saw schools as a 
crucial link to national integration. Thus, schools became a "powerful means to 
forge nationalistic loyalties and identities over ethnic, religious, and class 
division", and through schools, "a uniform national ideology, view of history, 
and a set of values" were communicated to Indonesian citizens.

As such, the Soeharto government went to great length to ensure ideological 
uniformity -- among others, through the way curricula are interpreted.

"In years immediately after independence, teachers had great leeway to 
interpret the broad guidelines outlined by the [Ministry of Education and Culture]; 
during the 1970s, in contrast, teachers were `increasingly burdened by more 
syllabus subjects, more detailed curricula, more numerous instructional 
objectives. (Schaeffer, 1990: 80)'" (p. 53)

A heavy emphasis was put on obedience and loyalty in schools. For instance, 
principals rated their teachers based on criteria such as loyalty, work 
performance, obedience, honesty, cooperation and initiative. For all of these 
criteria, 75 was the passing grade -- bar one: loyalty, in which a teacher had to 
achieve a score of 90 to continue working in any school.

All of these criteria, Bjork argues, indicated to teachers that their primary 
responsibility is to support the objectives set by the "center" in Jakarta. 
They reinforced the notion that "teachers are valued for their willingness to 
serve the government, not their skills as educators" (p. 95) -- something that 
was confirmed by the tacit requirements for public school teachers to join the 
Indonesian Civil Servants Corps (Korpri) and vote for the ruling Golkar party.

Instead of being mere teachers, educators were expected to become 
teacher-cum-bureaucrats.

Bjork compellingly illustrates how, on many occasions, the bureaucrat 
identity trumps that of a teacher.

Teachers, for instance, would make sure to come on time for the flag ceremony 
every morning, yet would stop a lesson and leave for no apparent reason. The 
excitement that arose during a teachers meeting to prepare a celebration would 
be absent when the meeting's subject was teaching and the new curriculum. 
There were exceptions, of course, but the examples above proved to be the rule.

This mentality, Bjork argues, was also responsible for the failure of the 
much-hyped Local Content Curriculum (LCC) policy of the early 1990s. The central 
government, keen to follow the global trend of education decentralization, 
allowed -- even required -- school administrators to devote 20 percent of 
instructional hours for locally designed curriculum. This greater freedom did not 
move teachers to experiment with the curriculum. Instead, they simply relabeled 
existing courses "LCC courses".

Why was there little enthusiasm for this policy, despite the fact that it was 
uniformly considered good on paper?

According to Bjork, there is that teacher-bureaucrat mentality on the one 
hand: "Teachers in Indonesia do not cast themselves in the role of change agent; 
they do not even audition for the part... The instructor's role as a civil 
servant was emphasized over that of educator, and his opportunities to shape 
school policy and practice were limited. Obedience rather than initiative was 
rewarded." (p. 110)

On the other hand, officials often fail to grasp that education 
decentralization is not merely a technical process, but a process that demands drastic 
institutional changes. "Decentralization," suggests Bjork, "requires a change in 
institutional culture, but the [Ministry of Education and Culture] is only 
addressing the technical aspects of this process." (p. 172)

Until now, the hype of education decentralization remains. In its last 
incarnation, it comes under the name "school-based management". Failures of the past 
do not suggest that it will fail this time around. But they do suggest that 
something clearly needs fixing.

For success, Bjork argues that "government employees at both central and 
local levels must be firmly committed to the ideals that underpin 
decentralization, and lend adequate material and logistical support to reform efforts."

Alas, judging from the recent national exam controversy, one is left to 
wonder whether these commitments are indeed there.

The reviewer lives in Jakarta, and can be reached at abgaduh at gmail.com.

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Joyo Indonesia News Service
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