Learning Laboratory

RISE Indonesia has shown that high-quality evidence, participatory engagements with policymakers, and a focus on real-world problem solving can bring about reform. The challenge now is to match the scale of the problem to how we can apply these methods to a still developing country with three time zones and speaks 762 languages. We’re on the right track, but we’re not there yet.  

The system is massive, with 3 million teachers and 69 million students at primary and secondary levels. It is highly decentralized, meaning that 500+ local governments can autonomously set their own education policies. And without specific recovery policies, the significant learning loss due to prolonged school closures will likely worsen the learning crisis. We intend to continue working with policymakers on these issues, together with any global partners who share the same concerns. 

The education system is a suitable platform for our analysis for two main reasons. First, local education offices are exceptionally active in implementing local-level policies. Second, measures on outcomes related to the education system is commonly found in large-scale national surveys, allowing us to construct a comprehensive data set.

Selecting good teachers is vital as it can lead to a pool of teachers who will continuously strive to improve their teaching quality. Therefore, strengthening the assessment tools for screening effective teachers at their point of entry into the profession is important to improving teaching quality.

Since the enforcement of decentralisation local governments have the discretion to implement policies to improve the quality of education at the local level. However, according to RISE findings, numerous local governments lack the capacity to design education policy innovations in their regions.

So, what is the way to help local governments formulate education policy innovations appropriate to their respective context and needs?

In this Note, we aim to understand how the schools and teachers respond to the new teacher professional development system. We compare experience and motivation of different characteristics of teachers.

Despite the growing attention to the importance of learning culture among teachers in enhancing teaching quality, we lack systematic knowledge about how to build such a culture. Can demand-driven teacher professional development (TPD) enhance learning culture among teachers? To answer the question, we assess the implementation of the TPD reform in Jakarta, Indonesia.

RISE Programme in Indonesia and the Kebumen District Education Agency, one of RISE's learning laboratory areas, carried out a programme, Improving Parental Involvement in a Children’s Education, from February 2020 to April 2021. This programme examined ways to overcome the low participation of parents in children’s education in Kebumen. RISE diagnostic study found that parents in Kebumen did not receive adequate information about their children’s learning progress from school. In addition, due to low educational background and lack of knowledge, parents were less confident to be more involved in educating their children.

This paper examines the politics of education policies in a decentralised political system: Under what conditions does decentralisation promote learning-enhancing policies? Despite the numerous works that have been written on decentralisation and education, little is known about how politics influenced local education policies.