Our study at The SMERU Research Institute from April to June 2020, which involved 290 primary school teachers across 25 provinces, found that the school principal's role was still lacking in assisting teachers who had difficulty implementing distance learning during the pandemic.
Around 63% of schools in regions imposing public activity restriction (PPKM) levels 1, 2, and 3 are permitted to hold in-person learning. Analyses of previous studies, for example, described how unequal and ineffective learning from home results in many students losing their reading ability equivalent to 6 months of learning, and risks to erase demographic bonus and reduce children’s future income.
Hopefully, the government, schools, and parents can work together in facilitating student learning activities, both at school and home. Indonesian children are entitled to quality education, both in-person and distance. Happy National Education Day!
The ineffective learning from home during the COVID-19 pandemic can erase opportunities to benefit from the dividend. Students who are now learning from home will enter the workforce around 2035.
The decision to reopen schools to carry out in-person learning is left to local governments. Several regions have decided to reopen schools, while others put off the decision because of the surge of COVID-19 cases. Is devolving the authority to reopen schools to local governments the right decision?
For more than four decades, Indonesia has carried out a variety of teacher professional development (TPD) programmes. Yet the outcomes have fallen short. Teachers continue to show limited subject knowledge and inadequate pedagogical skills. Indonesian students’ learning level remains low.
Even before this year’s Covid-19 pandemic, Indonesian students’ academic performance lagged behind their peers in other countries. When the pandemic hit, many lost the chance to catch up, and now are at risk of significant learning loss due to prolonged school closures.
The Indonesian government introduced a distance-learning policy in mid-March 2020. Teachers, students and parents are facing many challenges as a result.
In Indonesia, cheating on national exams was so widespread that a mother who exposed that her child's teacher promoted cheating was accused by other parents to be a ‘disgrace to the school’. When cheating is so common, it is likely that teachers and students collude to cheat. In that case, there is little chance that they will work to mitigate it, so it becomes hard to fight.
In our previous blog, we discussed recent policy changes to shift junior secondary school admissions to those based on house-to-school proximity instead of the Grade 6 exam score. We showed that when Yogyakarta implemented this new admission policy, colloquially referred to as the ‘school zoning policy’, the student composition changed significantly. Many students with lower test scores and poor students who had not been previously admitted to public schools were now attending them, substantially improving equity in access to public schools.