Behavioral and Experimental Economics for Teacher Policy

Over the past few decades, Indonesia has been trying numerous efforts to develop its education system. These efforts have resulted in several positive trends such as the increase on number of enrolment rates. However, Indonesia still faces several problems and challenges in regards to the quality of education. Rosser (2018) stated that one of the main causes of the low educational quality in Indonesia is due to the low quality of teachers. Despite the soaring government expenditure to increase teachers’ welfare through incentive and reward programs, accounting for more than 60% of the national education budget, the quality of learning remains unimproved (Bima and Yusrina, 2018). Meanwhile, studies have shown that teachers contribute the greatest amount to students’ learning outcomes (Gurganious, 2017). Therefore, in order to leverage education quality in Indonesia, we argue that there should be a more effective approach to empower teachers by providing a nudge mechanism in the incentive and reward programs as well as decentralisation of education management to the level of teachers.

First of all, in regards to the incentive and reward programs, government needs to consider using the principles of behavioural economics in nudging the teachers to achieve the expected outcomes. Such principles include the hyperbolic discounting, default option, and choice architecture. While many behavioural economics interventions have met with tremendous success up to this day, they are not guaranteed to work in all conditions. Thus, to further accelerate the success of this program, government should also consider to allocate a fixed percentage of budget for doing field-based experiments in order to come up with best practices.

Second, despite the implementation of educational decentralization to local government in Indonesia, we perceive that the practice still falls under the category of administrative model. Regarding the role of teacher in education system, we assert that, up to this day, there is limited profesional autonomy for teachers. The burden of enourmous administrative tasks might curtail their competency as an educator. On that account, we argue that teachers should have the freedom to innovate and determine appropriate methods of learning deliveries in accordance to the needs and capabilities of their students. This might result in a better learning environment which eventually contribute to the learning outcomes of the students as teachers are the ones who have the capacity to observe their students’ behaviour.

REFERENCES

Bima, L. and Yusrina, A. (2018) Prosperous Teachers Have No Impact on the Quality of Education | RISE Programme. Available at: https://www.riseprogramme.org/blog/prosperous_teachers_have_no_impact (Accessed: 26 April 2019).

Gurganious, N. J. (2017) The Relationship Between Teacher Autonomy and Middle School Students’ Achievement in Science, Walden University ScholarWorks. Walden University

Rosser, A. 2018. Beyond Access: Making Indonesia’s Education System Work. Melbourne: Lowy Institute