Does Teacher’s Allowance Enhance Student Achievement? Evidence from Indonesia Elementary Level Assesment

Abstraksi

The development of elementary education in Indonesia has reached its new main issue related to education quality since net enrollment rate hits nearly 100% per 2016 in almost all provinces. This issue is very important since elementary education have been an influential indicator for student’s performance in the next education level and life skills in general. Moreover, the issue is not only how elementary students perform at national level, but how inclusive the performance is. Using Indonesia National Assessment Programme data from Ministry of Education and Culture in 2016, we found that provinces in West Indonesia perform better than their peers in East Indonesia in reading, mathematics, and science. To improve the quality of elementary education, one of the important determinants is teacher’s performance (Gershenson, 2016). Until now, Government of Indonesia (GoI) has been using some policy instruments to improve teacher quality and professionalism; one of them is teacher professional allowance. The allowance is a kind of incentive for teachers who are professionally certified. This research tries to assess the impact of teacher professional allowance on student academic achievement as indicated by INAP score 2016 from all provinces in Indonesia. Using fractional response and OLS regressions, we found that there is no consistent association between teacher professional allowance and student academic achievement. The results of this study implies that the GoI should develop policy instruments to boost teacher performance that directly affect student achievement and to reduce the the disparity of student achievement between east and west part of Indonesia.