Civil servant teacher & lecturer crisis
Amid an era of fiscal strain, good management to ensure that the budget is being used efficiently and effectively so it can produce good results is of more importance. Without it, the education budget, which reaches 20 percent of APBN/APBD, will not exert a significant impact on improving the quality of education, because instead of being spent on unnecessary expenses, instead of efforts to improve education operations. For example, if the budget for the Mobilization Organization Program, (POP) which amounts to hundreds of billions of Rupiah every year, is to be allocated to increasing teacher welfare, it would certainly have a much more positive impact than merely conducting training sessions whereby the facilitators are also not necessarily superior to participating teachers.
We have yet to fully recover from the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has put tremendous pressure on APBN. The logical consequence is that the education budget cannot be increased as needed. As people’s purchasing power declines, they cannot be forced to also finance education in an optimal way. People tend to look for free schools, so the community’s ability to pay for education is low. This is a challenge for Kemdikbudristek, to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the education budget.
Another problem that has been ongoing since a decade ago is the crisis of civil servant (PNS) teachers and lecturers, which can directly affect the quality of national education. Because they have job security and stability, they tend to perform better than contract/non-permanent teachers and lecturers.
We can’t possibly expect the performance of contract teachers/ lecturers to be on par with their civil servant counterparts. This is because they don’t have the same rights. In terms of quality, contract teachers are those who failed to pass civil service recruitment. And with their contract terminable at any time and without a pension, they are always anxious about their future. This contrasts with civil servant teachers who will not be fired as long as they do not commit serious violations. This is why the urgent matter today is to recruit more civil servant teachers/lecturers.
The government has been recruiting primary school teachers massively since the 1970s-1980s, to staff SD Inpres (primary schools built under the Soeharto presidency) in the villages. Massive recruitment of junior high school (SMP) teachers followed in the 1980s-1990s, along with the enactment of six-year compulsory education (May 2, 1984) and nine-year compulsory education (May 2, 1994), while the recruitment of senior high school teachers on a large scale occurred in the 1990s, coinciding with the establishment of public senior high schools (SMA)/vocational schools (SMK) in each sub-district. Since 2012 these teachers have entered their retirement age while new recruitments have been lagging. Currently, the shortage of civil servant teachers in each regency/municipality ranges from 1,000-2,000. Meanwhile, the recruitment of civil servant lecturers has slowed after a number of state universities changed their status to state-owned legal entities (BHMN) and now legal entity higher education institutions (PTN-BH). Since then, many state universities have recruited lecturers as their employees, not as civil servants.
Amid the shortage of civil servant teachers and lecturers and budget strain, the efficiency and effectiveness of using the state budget to improve the quality of national education becomes very important. Whoever the Minister of Education is, he/she should not need to launch too many wasteful experiments, whose results are not necessarily good. It is better to focus on solving problems that have wide-ranging impact. Needless to say, in education, educators (teachers and lecturers) play a central role. Therefore, if the government is able to solve this vexing problem, the “tangled thread” in the national education can begin to be unraveled. Otherwise, the government is not actually solving the problem, only sweeping it under the rug.
Recruitment of contract teachers can solve the problem of teacher shortages in a short time, but this isn’t a permanent solution. This is because when they see other more promising opportunities outside the educational sector, they will leave the teaching profession in droves. But it is rare for civil servant teachers to leave the teaching profession because of more lucrative offers outside the educational sector. Apart from that, when becoming a civil servant teacher is no longer attractive, high-performing senior high school students will no longer be interested in joining teacher training institutions (LPTK). As a result, those who do so are not the top graduates but those who failed to get into a reputable university. In fact, after the Law 14/2005 on teachers and lecturers, which provisions teachers’ professional allowance, the interest of high school graduates to join LPTK, which has set a high passing grade, has increased. However, the government’s policy to recruit more contract teachers is likely to dampen their interest. That is why the recruitment of contract teachers should only be a temporary solution, not a permanent one. If the government is experiencing budget constraints, then the existing budget should be focused on tackling this strategic problem, not paying for a shadow team. This is a reflection of poor management.
We always refer to the Finnish education model, which is said to be the best in the world, but we don’t want to really study it. Finland has advanced education because they highly value their teachers. Teachers there have a high social status, because those who enter the teacher training colleges are as smart as those who enter the faculty of medicine or engineering. On the contrary, those who enter LPTK in Indonesia are often those who are not accepted in the science faculties. This is due to the low financial rewards and social status of becoming a teacher in Indonesia, so smart graduates who rank in the top ten are less interested in becoming teachers. If we want to advance national education, the government should turn its attention to “glorify” teachers, to make the teaching profession prestigious and respectable, one that comes with financial security and stability.