Education Predators

National education has become a perennial tug-of-war of political interests over money. The rupiah has drawn educational predators with vested interests into a battle for power. Preventing the lust of educational predators from robbing the state’s education budget is a matter of urgency!

The oscillation and tug-of-war of political interests have made our education stagnant to this day.

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> Education-is Not a- Commodity

> Indonesia’s Higher Education in Transitional Period

On tracking this, all point to the vortex of the political economy. Whoever the perpetrator is, the political economy will be driven to control the capital. The trigger can be political, social, or economic ideologies that are promoted for the sake of individual or group interests (local, national, global, secular, or spiritual-religious).

Political roots

Andrew Rosser's article, “Beyond Access: Making Indonesia's Education System Work” (Lowy Institute, 21 Feb. 2018), concludes that the stagnancy of Indonesian education stems from a quandary of politics and power.

He writes: “Indonesia’s poor education performance has not simply been a matter of a matter of low public spending on education, human resource deficits, perverse incentive structures, and poor management. It has, at its root, been a matter of politics and power.

"Change in the quality of Indonesia’s education system thus depends on a shift in the balance of power between competing coalitions that have a stake in the nature of education policy and its implementation.”

Rosser's 2018 analysis is still relevant today. He has even seen no significant changes in the politics of education in contemporary Indonesia.

Rosser presented his analysis at the annual conference of the Research Initiative for Scientific Enhancement (RISE) in September at the University of Oxford.

Rosser, King and Widoyoko (2021) state that the learning crisis in Indonesia is a reflection of political domination during the New Order and the post-New Order (Reformasi) eras.

KOMPAS/AGUS SUSANTO

Children take an exam at Sumbermujur 05 Elementary School, Pronojiwo District, Lumajang Regency, East Java, Thursday (9/12/2021).

During these periods, the so-called predatory elite emerged from among politicians, bureaucrats, and businesspeople. They rode the education system to accumulate wealth, distribute their patronage or “local kings”, and mobilize educational resources for political interests. They exercised political control rather than focusing on the creation of a skilled workforce with critical thinking.

Scrutinizing the identities of these elite educational predators from the New Order until now, we find that the perpetrators are groups, namely the bureaucratic elite (government officials, civil servants, regional heads), the political elite (members of mass organizations) and the corporate elite.

In the post-New Order era, the political elite was more dominant and embraced government officials, bureaucrats and businesspeople.

In the New Order era, the bureaucratic elite dominated power. They were the ones who embraced the political elite and the corporate elite. In the post-New Order era, the political elite was more dominant and embraced government officials, bureaucrats and businesspeople.

Also read: The Future of Higher Education Institutions

There is a current shift in the pendulum, namely the corporate elite have embraced government officials, bureaucrats, and businesspeople at both the global and multinational level.

Delusive transformation

The hope for significant change by ceding the position of the education ministry from groups to individuals believed to be independent of political affiliation (instead of bureaucrats and mass organizations) has not materialized.

The many policy controversies that have emerged in the Nadiem Makarim era are not a sign of disruption, but of incompetence.

The semiotics that the public read in the photos of Nadiem engaging with Megawati in the build-up to the Cabinet reshuffle indicated that the aspiration for independent transformation was mere delusion. The politicization of education will never move our education forward.

Overlooked classroom

Our education crisis, which stems from the mass construction of elementary schools regime to provide more access to basic education under the presidential instructions of former president Soeharto, is the quality of learning outcomes. However, education policymakers have never cared about this.

Our literacy rate is currently experiencing a 20-year setback with a score of 371 in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Our education does poorly in every international survey.

Low literacy makes the public lame and prey to jargon, symbols, provocation, and ostentatious promotions about Indonesia’s education transformation.

The Merdeka Belajar (independent learning) program was launched only to give rise to controversies at the onset, because it manipulates the concept of Ki Hadjar Dewantoro (KHD) into a trademarked business brand.

The corporate elite has been driving the national education policy in Senayan since the beginning. Promoting KHD’s learning concepts without any real implementation will only end up as meaningless jargon.

Global researches show that improving a country's education quality is only possible if there is fundamental change in the classroom.

Unfortunately, if we examine its contents, episodes 1 to 14 of the Merdeka Belajar learning concept has no direct impact on teachers' pedagogical competence in the classroom, except for the Guru Penggerak (teacher mover) program.

KOMPAS/RIZA FATHONI

Health workers invite high-fives greetings with school students after receiving Sinovac vaccine injections at SDN 02 Pondok Bambu, East Jakarta, Tuesday (14/12/2021).

The Guru Penggerak program appears to be very elitist and expensive. The 2022 budget for teaching and learning quality programs is Rp 11.4 trillion. The allocation for the Guru Penggerak program alone is around Rp 2 trillion, as the Education, Research, Culture and Technology Ministry (Kemendikbudristek) revealed to Commission X of the House of Representatives (DPR).

Until now, the Guru Penggerak program has reached only around 8,000 of the 3 million teachers in Indonesia. What is the intervention for these 3 million teachers? The Guru Penggerak program is clearly very elitist, inequitable, and far from the vision of social justice sought in teacher transformation.

Conflicts of interest

What is more concerning is the inherent emergence of conflicts of interest in education policy design. The Merdeka Belajar concept has, from its outset, emitted an unpleasant smell as an indication of conflicts of interest.

Also read: Taking The Education Gamble

The management of the School Operational Assistance (BOS) at the beginning of the pandemic gave a similar indication. Conflict of interest was evident when the education ministry collaborated with various paid online education platforms and paved a broad way for misusing the BOS funds under the cover of the Covid-19 pandemic.

In the education ministry’s regulations, the technical procedures for BOS management indeed do not mention the paid online platforms by name, but these brands were publicly mentioned in the ministry’s press release.

This is the first time in history that the education ministry has turned into an advertiser that endorses products. These paid online platforms, which the education ministry calls “free”, are in fact, not free.

These various paid online platforms gathered data on students, teachers, and parents before the students had received their services.

Conflicts of interest and procedural errors were also indicated when designing the Mobilizing Organization Program (POP), as raised by the education ministry’s inspector general and House Commission X.

Was it an education survey or a campaign to gather public perception about presidential candidates?

Suspicion over politicization arose most recently when the education ministry conducted a survey on public aspirations and perceptions in collaboration with the Indonesian Political Indicators Institute. Was it an education survey or a campaign to gather public perception about presidential candidates?

Public ethics

In his book Etika Publik (public ethics; 2015) Haryatmoko states, “Conflicts of interest are the gateway to corruption. For individual or group interests, it is very dangerous when a public official is also an owner of a company.” (p. 123)

Haryatmoko emphasizes that conflicts of interest that encourage corruption always involve indirect transactions, for example, if a ministerial policy favors a company in which the minister has an interest; a company that is owned by their family, colleague, association, or commissioner that could be an indirect reward (p. 129).

"[Collusion is not necessarily done] with money going directly for personal gain. It can also be a misuse of resources to benefit the clique," says Haryatmoko.

Until now, there has been no firm regulation to manage conflicts of interest in designing education policies.

The Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) only regulates conflicts of interest in the procurement of goods and services by officials. It does not regulate conflicts of interest that may occur during policymaking, including how ministers choose their special staffers in order to avoid conflicts of interest.

KOMPAS/RIZA FATHONI

School students walk in groups from the classroom to the vaccination site to receive an injection of the Covid-19 vaccine at SDN 02 Pondok Bambu, East Jakarta, Tuesday (14/12/2021).

Humans are weak creatures who are easily tempted by wealth, no matter how rich that person is. Good people could still resort to theft if in the work environment there is no structural mechanism to audit and control independently and continuously the behavior and authority of policymakers.

Selecting individuals with integrity as public officials is clearly an urgent prerequisite. Even so, without public modality, individuals with good integrity records can be broken.

Public ethics aimed at improving the quality of education services should be the main focus for educational transformation. The space for conflicts of interest being unable to be ensnared by the anticorruption law must be narrowed down.

Also read: Education Evaluation

Strengthening public accountability modalities through a system that keeps the norms of integrity upheld from the moment of designing education policy is a matter of urgency.

Otherwise, the education budget of trillions of rupiah will be wasted. This big money will only be served as big pies for predatory education elite who collude with bureaucrats, politicians, and local-global corporations that are sure to be tempted by the abundance of education budget money.

DOKUMENTASI PRIBADI

Doni Koesoema A

Doni Koesoema A, Education observer and founder of Character-Building Education Consulting

(This article was translated by Musthofid).