Where are the PPPK teachers?
Nadiem Anwar Makarim, the Minister of Education and Culture, committed to hire one million PPPK teachers by 2021 when he first took office. However, the promise remained unfulfilled because only about 300,000 PPPK instructors had been hired by that time. This demonstrates Minister Nadiem’s lack of managerial ability. The Ministry of Administrative and Bureaucratic Reform (PANRB) has published the application data for PPPK instructors for 2021.:
Based on the data above, it is clear that the government, in this case the Education, Culture, Research, and Technology Ministry has been slow to execute its own plan. This also shows that Minister Nadiem has no clear sense of priority and is unable to distinguish strategic from non-strategic programs — not due to the government’s lack of budget.
Ministery’s poor management is further demonstrated by the fact that a number of it’s activities are not prioritized or urgent in addressing the country’s educational concerns. Obviously, we have a teacher shortage (PNS and PPPK), but the budget is focused on implementing the Mobilization Organization Program (POP), Mobilization Schools (SP), Mobilization Teachers (GP), curriculum revision, institutional changes in technical management units (UPT) within the Ministry of Education, Culture, Research and Technology, and national assessment, all of which require a large budget.
If Minister Nadiem is smart and a strategic thinker, the new programs that take up a large portion of the budget but whose contribution to improving the quality of education is unclear will not be prioritized and the existing budget allocated to recruit PPPK teachers as he promised. This indicates that Minister Nadiem does not understand the real problems faced by the education sector on the ground. Those programs he prioritized will be in vain if the pressing needs for more teachers are not met.
Implementing those programs cost a lot of money but their contribution to improving the quality of education is questionable, while the deficit of teachers (quantitatively and qualitatively) is not being solved. This is clearly a huge mistake in national education policy during and after the pandemic. This happened because policymakers did not understand education issues on the ground and the management was not accommodative so that they did not get external input. If the Education, Culture, Research and Technology Ministry is open as in the past, Minister Nadiem’s ignorance of the state of the education sector can be rectified by input from those who know the conditions on the ground very well.
Satriawan Salim, national coordinator of the Education and Teachers Association (P2G), urges the government to prioritize the recruitment of 193,954 teachers who have passed the PPPK passing grade in 2021 but have yet to be inducted into the teaching force. There are actually still many slots to be filled and the government has sufficient budget as long as it is able to prioritize the right programs. The delay in employing PPPK teachers who have met the passing grade will only prolong their uncertain fate. In any case, there should be an explanation, why have the graduates yet to be inducted?
The induction of PPPK teachers will also become problematic if they are not placed in their schools of origin, but instead transferred to other schools. A high school teacher in Sidoarjo, East Java, said that his school experienced PNS teacher shortage, so he recruited honorary teachers who then went to undertook and passed the 2021 selection but they were eventually placed in different schools. The same thing happened at a private junior high school we manage in Gunungkidul. Three of our honorary teachers passed the selection and were placed in other schools, so we lost three senior honorary teachers. The Education, Culture, Research and Technology Minister should have a fully-baked human resource plan so that the recruitment of PPPK teachers does not result in schools, both public and private, losing their valuable teachers.