Systemic Constraints Facing Teacher Professional Development in a Middle-Income Country: Indonesia’s Experience Over Four Decades

Abstract

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? In the present study we investigate what caused these reforms to fail from two angles. First, we examine the efficacy of the latest teacher professional development (TPD) initiative in Indonesia, Pengembangan Keprofesian Berkelanjutan or PKB (Continuing Professional Development), and identify the factors affecting its efficacy. We found that some essential features of effective TPD are missing in PKB. The PKB programme has not targeted teachers based on years of experience, has not followed up teachers with post-training activities, has not incorporated teaching practice through lesson enactment, and has not built upon teacher existing practice. Second, our analysis demonstrates that PKB's weaknesses have existed in Indonesia's previous TPD initiatives as far back as four decades ago. This indicates that the long-term problem of TPD’s ineffectiveness is driven by different elements of the education system beyond the TPD’s technical and operational aspects. Our system-level analysis points out that merely improving the technical aspects of TPD would be insufficient given the Indonesian education system’s lack of coherence surrounding teacher quality. The problems surrounding the provision of effective TPD is more complex than simply a matter of replacing the “old” with the “new” initiative. The change requires a reorientation of the education system to produce high-quality teachers.

Teacher Careers in Education Systems That Are Coherent for Learning: Choose and Curate Toward Commitment to Capable and Committed Teachers (5Cs)

“…This has been demonstrated time and again, and is discussed further in Section 2.2. For example, the past few decades have seen multiple reform attempts in Indonesia, but incremental improvements in the technical quality of inservice teacher training have failed to meaningfully shift the norms of classroom practice (Revina et al, 2020). More strikingly, a national policy that effectively doubled the salaries of teachers did not lead to any gains in student learning (de Ree et al, 2018).…”

“…b. isomorphic mimicry in which systems go through the motions of 'reform' and improvement and core service functions like pre-service training (Warwick & Reimers, 1995) or in-service teacher training (Revina et al, 2020); and/or c. outright capture for other purposes like patronage employment or contracts for construction or inputs.…”

“…Changes based on thin inputs typically fail to yield purpose-driven reorientation, instead yielding isomorphic mimicry, i.e., changes that make the organisation 'look right' (Pritchett, 2013(Pritchett, , 2014drawing on DiMaggio & Powell, 1983). One example of ineffective and largely isomorphic change based on thin inputs is Indonesia's 2013 initiative for teachers' continuous professional development, which was intended to overcome the shortcomings of prior inservice teacher training programmes by targeting training modules to individual teachers based on their assessed knowledge and by linking successful completion of the modules to credit points for civil service promotion (Revina et al, 2020). Consequently, this reform was systemic in attempting to link support, in the form of in-service training, with delegation and finance, in the form of promotions and the associated salary bump, within teacher career system.…”

Investing in competences and skills and reforming the labour market to create better jobs in Indonesia

“…Teacher professional development can fill possible gaps at recruitment. However, in Indonesia, teachers' continuous training has suffered from lack of incentives, poor adaptation to teachers' experience and absence of follow-up (Revina et al, 2020). Therefore, training does not improve teaching quality and the latest government's initiative (Pengembangan Keprofesian Berkelanjutan) has failed to produce significant advances (ibid.).…”

Innovation on Education and Social Sciences

“…Program for International student assessment (PISA), an international student assessment that measures numeracy and literacy skills of 15 years old students, which was released in December 2019, put Indonesian teachers and Indonesian education in general under tight scrutiny. The fact that the outcome of PISA 2019 was precisely the same as in the year 2000 indicates that schools in Indonesia have not improved for the last 18 years (Revina, Pramana, Fillaili, & Suryadarma, 2020). Students' performance remains poor, which has led to scrutiny of the Indonesian government's effort to improve the quality of teaching in Indonesia, which have taken place over the past ten years through the teacher certification policy and the government's commitment to allocate 20% of the national budget to the education sector.…”