Going for a Higher Plane: Introducing “DDEA” to Shift Policy Focus from Schooling to Learning

Abstraksi

Preparing children to flourish as adults should be the ultimate goal of education. However, evidence from many developing countries, including Indonesia, leave us a key message that sending children to school for years has not always lead to an improvement in the quality of human capital. Almost all children in Indonesia spent at least 12 years of their early life in school. The school attainment rate has reached more than 90% for primary school and more than 75% for junior secondary school (APK-APM Kemdikbud, 2018). Surprisingly, a longitudinal data of Indonesian student ability in solving mathematics questions show a very little to no different numeracy ability between students of Grades 1 and 12 (Beatty et al., 2018). Since 1999, the Indonesian central government has devolved the responsibility of managing and controlling primary and junior secondary schools to the district level, thus increasing the role of district governments in improving basic education quality. Departing from here, as part of the RISE Programme in Indonesia, we conducted diagnostic studies in two of RISE’s learning laboratories, Kabupaten Way Kanan and Kabupaten Kebumen. In the two districts, we aim to understand how and what local governments do to improve learning quality in their regions. Our early findings show that in addition to implementing central government education programmes (e.g. curriculum implementation training and principal candidacy training), Way Kanan district government allocates its education budget into programmes that are loosely connected to learning outcomes, such as Quran recitation and green school programme. In Kebumen, the district government has implemented programmes which are more corresponding to learning quality improvement, where teachers are required to discuss every achievement standard point that will be tested in the national examination. Nevertheless, we found that this initiative is still insufficient to improve the quality of learning as practices in the classroom still focus on teaching to the test rather than increasing student learning capacity. From the above examples, we see that much of these two districts’ efforts to improve education quality is still largely non-existent (Way Kanan), or limited to superficial programmes with limited impacts (Kebumen). Therefore, both districts need to shift their paradigm in delivering basic education services from doing business as usual to establishing innovative policies that directly address the root causes of the low learning outcome. The key challenge here is to not only ensure all students got schooled, but also make sure that they learn sufficient knowledge. Departing from this challenge, we implemented the Diagnose, Design, Evaluate, and Adapt/DDEA framework in Way Kanan and Kebumen. The DDEA is a framework that we adopted from the Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation/PDIA method and Political Economy Analysis framework. We used the PDIA to identify the area for policy change and its key underlying problems (Andrews, Pritchett and Woolcock, 2017). Whereas, the Political Economy Analysis was appropriate to map the political actors and space to design the most feasible intervention programme for each respective district (Rosser and Fahmi, 2016). We started with Diagnosis phase where we conducted discussions with local education stakeholders to explore problems that have hindered the improvement of learning outcome and which problem should be prioritised. We then deconstructed the prioritised problem to identify the root of causes by putting data obtained from interviews, observations, and group discussions into the 5-whys framework. We first mapped the actors involved in the education system in the districts, their interests, and their agendas. The map helped us to decide who will be involved in each step of the DDEA, how their involvement would be, and whether those actors should be gathered in one group discussion or separated into different groups. The second phase is Design. In this phase, we collaborated with local champions to design a programme based on the results of the diagnostic exercise. This collaboration ensures the resultant intervention is technically and politically feasible. The co-design may also increase the future sustainability and ownership of the initiatives. The initiatives are also designed with rigorous evaluation in mind to ensure that they would have measurable and empirical impacts. The result of this evaluation will then be used to redesign and be adapted to the original intervention. Conducting DDEA in two districts with different level of capacity and acceptance to the problem left us with several key learning points. First, co-design is important to ensure the relevance of the initiative to the existing problems and local capacity to solve them. Second, the rigorous diagnosis process helped us uncover which initiative is realistic enough to be implemented, given the authority and capacity of the stakeholders. A system will only function if the people who run the function has the capacity to actually make it works instead of only complying with administrative standards. Third, emphasis on rigorous and measurable impact should be incorporated in the programme design from the commencement of the DDEA process.