Empowering Parents: Innovative Policies to Improve School Quality and Funding

Abstraksi

As the fourth most populous country in the world, Indonesia’s human capital has the potential to be a demographic bonus in the near future. It is important to ensure that the large size of human capital gains adequate quality, which is brought about by education. Indonesia has been successful in increasing participation levels to near universal elementary and secondary education; it is the quality of education that remains to be improved. The stagnating quality of education in Indonesia is presumed to be caused – among other factors - by the lack of competition between different school models and by the lack of parental choice between these models. It is argued that, by giving parents the ability to choose, the schools most suitable to their needs will improve educational quality to attract more students. Using the comparative method, this paper analyzes advantages and shortcomings of two school choice programs, namely school vouchers and Education Saving Account (ESA) in countries such as the United States, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Chile. School vouchers are designed as a student-based mechanism to cover school tuition fees. ESA are more complex than school vouchers and can be optimized according to each student’s priority. These policies have shown promising results: improving quality of education, broadening education access to poor families, increasing efficiency of public education budgets, and increasing student enrollment to higher education level. These two systems can be potentially implemented in Indonesia with several adjustments to suit the current education framework. They may ultimately help to improve the quality of our human capital.