Policy Research
An impactful teacher education programme equips teachers with knowledge and skills to improve their effectiveness. Empirical findings on the effectiveness of teacher preparation programmes show that the accountability of institutions and teachers should not only be based on the knowledge or skills produced but also on student learning.
Focusing on Indonesia from 2005-2020, we examine how the largest teachers’ organization influenced labor policy but was marginal in debates about professional standards, training, and evaluation due to its limited technical capacity and struggles to propose viable policy alternatives. Expertise is a critical policy input, and it deserves more attention in the education politics subfield.
Despite government efforts to reform teacher professional development (TPD) in the past four decades, Indonesian teacher quality remains low. Why have the improvement efforts failed?
Cheating reduces the signal value of exam data and it might shift the focus of teachers and students away from learning. However, it is difficult to prevent cheating if it is widespread. We evaluate the impact of computer-based testing (CBT) on national exam scores in junior secondary schools in Indonesia, exploiting the phased roll-out of the program from 2015 to 2019.
Why is it so hard for Indonesia to recruit good teachers? We argue that the struggle to recruit good teachers are due to institutional, political economy, and social dynamics of the recruitment process. We will discuss three factors that underpin this issue. First, Indonesia’s dysfunctional teacher recruitment process as a byproduct of the country’s inchoate political and legal institutions.
