The reality behind our poor high school scores

Mochtar Buchori, Jakarta

The latest news about our junior and senior high schools is both shocking and distressing. It reveals the poor condition of our high school system. But what exactly are these conditions?

Most informed members within our society have long known about the sorry state of our education system. But the majority of our society are in fact not aware of this situation. So when the bad news about the latest national exam results broke, many people shook their heads in disbelief.

And who wouldn't? Learning that nationwide more than 16 percent of final year students in our junior and senior high schools flunked their national final exams is very distressing. And learning further that in some senior high schools this rate of failure is almost 30 percent, while in other schools none of the final year students passed the recent final exam test, this surely makes many people confused and frustrated.

This is especially true for those who were encouraged by the good news doing the rounds previously that teams of Indonesian students taking part in the international Olympiads for mathematics and physics performed very well, and managed to achieve the highest awards and recognition. This made many Indonesians seriously believe that our educational system had reached a level on par with that of our neighbors.

When I first read news about the massive failure rate in recent exams, I immediately thought about schools in remote areas that I had once visited or passed by during my various trips in the past. I thought of schools in Sentani, Papua, in Nanga Badau, West Kalimantan, in Atambua, Nusa Tenggara Timur, and of an SMU in Ponjong, Gunung Kidul. I wondered how students in these schools fared in the recent national final exams.

The fact that students in areas hit by tsunami or plagued by repeated local violence did poorly in the exams is no surprise. But even students in cities with well developed systems of education like Jakarta, Bogor, Yogyakarta, Semarang, Surabaya, and Malang, the failure rate was appalling, meaning that clearly there is something fundamentally wrong with the way we have been running our high schools.

Thus far, it has been teachers who have been blamed. While there is undoubtedly much truth in this allegation, I do not think that this kind of diagnosis will do much good in our future efforts to raise the quality of our high schools. Much more detailed information is needed to generate a clear idea concerning what should be done to correct the situation prevailing in our educational system.

To begin with, when it was stated that "only between 10 and 20 percent of teachers scored above average in recent competency tests held by the ministry [of National Education]", what exactly does this mean? What does "teachers competence" exactly comprise? And when it was stated that "the minimum requirements for new teachers will be D4 (four year diploma) or S1 (undergraduate degree) graduates with an additional 38 to 40 credits in a professional subject", again what does this actually mean? What is meant by a "professional subject"? And in the end, what are the ingredients of teachers' professional competence?

Unless concepts like "teachers competence", "professional subject", and the like are clearly defined and clarified I am afraid that the causes of the present underachievement among our students will never be remedied. Our schools will be forever trapped in this underachievement syndrome.

It is worth noting in this regard that in the past several efforts have been made to improve the competence of our teachers. But as far I am aware of, no attempt has ever been made to define clearly what this term "teachers' competence" exactly implies. What has been agreed was that a difference must be made and recognized between "subject matter competence" and the so-called "pedagogical competence", i.e competence in delivering to students a given set of knowledge and skills in a given area.

But how these two competencies relate to one another, and how they influence one another has never been sufficiently analyzed and discussed. And experience suggests that the broader and more integrated the knowledge of a teacher becomes, the more effective his/her method of teaching becomes. My suspicion has been that lack on knowledge regarding this matter has caused many of our teachers to become stuck at a particular level of teaching competence.

This is regrettable, since progress in teaching methodology should never come to a standstill. Improvements keep coming, as a continuous process. It is the duty of any unit of educational management to make sure that teachers are able to keep abreast with the ongoing progress in their profession.

And then, if we juxtapose this unpleasant fact about underachievement against the encouraging fact about the outstanding achievements of Indonesian students in the various international academic Olympiads, it becomes clear that there are two kinds of high school in our country, i.e the "privileged" and the "neglected". Is this situation politically defensible?

If we take this situation seriously, we are thus facing a two- fold task in this case. One is to raise the quality of the neglected high schools, and the other is to gradually reduce the gap that presently exists between these two types of high schools. Allowing this gap to stay there is both politically wrong and immoral.

Two important questions emerge in this regard. These are first: How are we going to carry out the task of raising the quality of neglected high schools, and to reduce the gap between "privileged" and "neglected" high schools? And second: How long will it take to correct each of these two educational ills? I am not in a position to give any suggestion how these questions should be answered. I am mentioning them just to remind ourselves us that these questions are there, and that somehow efforts must be made to resolve them.

Director General Fasli Djalal mentioned that it will take about 15 years to gradually improve the competence of our teachers through training. Again, I have two questions in this regard. First, what kind of training will be provided to ensure that 15 years hence our teachers will be equipped with competence that is commensurate with the state of art existing at that time? And second, how are the stages in this gradual development of teachers' competence going to be determined and implemented?

Again, these are questions which are not easy to answer. I am not inviting a debate or a polemic. I am merely trying to point out that there are hard questions to consider before we can move ahead, and implement measures that to the best of our judgment will create for this nation a proper educational system in the future.

The writer has a doctorate in education from Harvard University.