Education: is it all about the money?

Our constitution has made it clear that the government must allocate 20% of its annual budget to be spent on education [1]. This allocation, however, still remains elusive. In the 2008 budget plan, the figure will only be 12%. It is already higher than 2007 (11.8%) or 2006 (9.7%) but a long way away from the 20% demanded by the constitution [2].

It gets more embarrassing once you read this:
Indonesia invests just 3% per capita national income annually per primary student. The East Asia and the Pacific region has a median of 15%. In contrast, expenditure is at least five times higher - ranging from 15% to 22% - in Australia, Fiji, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of China, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Republic of Korea and Thailand. Countries in North America and Western Europe tend to spend close to 22%, Central and Eastern Europe 17%, Sub Saharan Africa 13%. Indonesia and Myanmar are the lowest two in the world ! [5]

How embarrassing is that?

Those facts have become a handy scapegoat when it comes to our frustration with regards to education. "Bad schools? Incompetent teachers? Bad curriculum? What do you expect? If only the government allocated the 20% ... if only we have more money.... if only, if only."

It all depends on the money.
Does it not?

Read on. The facts below may help you to think outside your money box:
Between 1980 and 2005, USA increased public spending per student by 73%. It employed more teachers, reduced class sizes, and launched thousands of initiatives aimed at improving the quality of education. The result? Almost no change in actual student outcomes (slight improvement in math, but reading score of the 9, 13, and 15 year old remained the same in 2005 as it was in 1980) [3]. America is not alone. Australia has almost tripled education spending per student since 1970. No improvement.

The same again in England: The British government has changed pretty much every aspect of education policy in England and Wales, often more than once. The only thing that has not changed has been the outcome [4].

Surely not all countries have failed? Indeed not. Canada, Finland, Japan, Singapore and South Korea have consistently come on top in the best performing countries as measured by the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment.

So what do they do right?
Is it the money? No: Singapore spends less on each student in primary education than almost any other developed country.
Longer study time? No again: In Finland students do not start school until they are 7 years old, and even then they attend classes for only 4 to 5 hours a day for the first 2 years [3].

So what do they do differently?

This report [4] suggests that the top performing school systems do 3 things well:
1. Get the right people to become teachers
2. Develop these teachers into effective instructors
3. Ensure every child benefits from it.

Aha! So how do you attract the best people to become teachers? By offering more money, surely?
Wrong again: If money were so important, then countries with the highest teacher salaries such as Germany, Spain and Switzerland-would be among the best. They are not. In practice, the top performers pay no more than average salaries [3].

If it is not the money, then what is it?
It's the status. In top performing countries, teaching is a high-status profession.

So how can teaching be a high-status profession if it pays no more than average salaries?

There is a lesson from South Korea:
In South Korea, it is more difficult to be a primary school teacher (who must have an undergraduate degree from selected universities and must get top grades) than it is to be a secondary school teacher (who only requires a diploma from any of the 350 colleges). This has created a huge supply of qualified secondary teachers, with 11 new secondary teachers for each job. As a result, secondary-school teaching is the lower status job in South Korea; everyone wants to be a primary-school teacher.

Or a lesson from Singapore and Finland:
Singapore screens candidates selectively and accepts only the number for which there are places. Once in, candidates are employed by the education ministry and more or less guaranteed a job. Finland also limits the supply of teacher-training places to demand [3].

A right government policy, apparently, can help boost the status of teaching jobs to a higher level.

Of course the top performing countries do not stop there:
Singapore provides teachers with 100 hours of training a year and appoints senior teachers to oversee professional development in each school. In Japan and Finland, groups of teachers visit each others' classrooms and plan lessons together.

But hey. If we can just start with fixing the selection process, we're already on the right track.

So what are we saying? That we do not need the earmarked 20%?

That is not what we are trying to say. It is the obligation of the government to obey the constitution, and if the constitution demands it then the government must deliver. Even more so when we already knew that we have spent too little so far.

What we are trying to say is this:

We do not need to wait for the 20% to start fixing. Some changes in the policy on teacher selection and placement will do so much without the additional cost. We have been changing the policies back and forth all this time anyway! It is just a matter of doing it right this time around: learning from the best, focusing on selecting the teachers, coming up with the right initiatives to support that and discarding the others that we know did not work and are not going to work. Now with decentralization, it can even be done right away at a smaller level, either regional or city level.
And for once, stop thinking that nothing can be done without money !

Yes folks, Look at the failures of some countries above and the successes of the top performers and you can see that it is not always about the money.

Because we are still haggling with our government on when we would get our 20%, we don't have the money yet, so it is good to learn from the top performers that getting good teachers depends on how we select and train them, and that teaching can become a career choice for top graduates without paying a fortune [3][4].

For the sake of our children, let us start now with our teachers.

After all, as a South Korean policymaker said, "The quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers." [4].
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[1] Indonesia's Constitution (in Indonesian)
[2] House of Representatives report
[3] Economist - How to be top in education
[4] Mckinsey report - World's School Systems (PDF file - 9.52 MB)
[5] Unesco Education Fact Sheet '07 No.6 (PDF file - 300 kB)
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Indonesia Anonymus is a group of Indonesian professionals who work and live in Jakarta. The group blogs anonymously to -- in their own words -- exercise their rights to be grumpy. Their blog can be found here.