Will Brehm  0:02
Sirojuddin Arif, welcome to FreshEd.

Sirojuddin Arif  0:58
Thank you, Will. Thanks for having me today. It’s an honor for me to be in your podcast.

Will Brehm  1:02
It was really wonderful to read your recently co-authored article. It was just really fantastic and a really nice insight into Indonesia. So, I guess, to start, could you tell me a little bit about what the value is of decentralization -at least supposedly, the way we think about decentralization- particularly within education policy circles. So, people that deal in education policy, how do they understand the value of decentralization?

Sirojuddin Arif  1:30
Okay. So, regarding the decentralization, the conventional wisdom says that by implementing decentralization, which means that we bring the government closer to people, so the government will have more opportunities to listen to their people, and it is easy for the people to articulate their interests, their demand. So, in the education sector, for example, whatever is the demand for the people, the expectation is that the government will be more responsive to the interests of the people. So, that’s the idea, why we have decentralization.

Will Brehm  2:05
And the idea, in a way, would be in contrast to centralization, where there might be some high-level government, centralized approach to education. You’re sort of saying that in a decentralized system, the school systems can respond to local demands and needs. And so, in effect, schools might look slightly different depending on what decentralized context you’re in. Is that kind of the idea?

Sirojuddin Arif  2:32
Yes, yes, you’re right, compared to centralization. So, decentralization demand from the population can be unique for every region. So, in the sense that, when you have decentralization, your government, by being close to the people, they listen to the real demands of the real people. If you have centralized government, you have many regions, for example, so the demand can be heterogeneous, which make it more difficult for the central government to implement what policies are relevant for the region.

Will Brehm  3:02
Right. Okay, so that’s sort of the abstract theory of why decentralization is seen as valuable. Of course, it looks differently in different contexts. So, in Indonesia, what’s sort of the history of decentralization? When did it first come about in Indonesia?

Sirojuddin Arif  3:22
So, decentralization was implemented rightly after the fall of the new order; the Suharto government. Under the Suharto government, everything was centralized. Not only in the education, but the overall government system was centralized. And many people believe that the centralization had significant consequences of how the public services was delivered on the people. There are many gaps, and there are many discrepancies across the region. So, people believe that for the big countries like Indonesia, the public services should be decentralized in order for the government to be more responsive to the demands of the local people.

Will Brehm  3:58
I mean, maybe to help understand decentralization and how it looks differently in different places in Indonesia, maybe it would be important to sort of explain the diversity of Indonesia to the audience, right? So, how diverse is Indonesia?

Sirojuddin Arif  4:12
Okay. So, under centralization, everything was controlled by the central government. Not only in terms of the curriculum, but also in terms of the allocation of teachers. In fact, Indonesia, right now, has more than 500 districts, and the education system is so massive in the sense that not only the number of districts, but the number of schools is very high. I think it’s more than 400,000 schools across the country. So, you can imagine that it is quite challenging, and really challenging to manage 400 schools across the whole country. It doesn’t count the fact that in terms of the socioeconomic development, the whole country is heterogeneous, from, let’s say, the high regional domestic product like Jakarta to low performing ones. So, under decentralized system, now actually, it is the local government, especially the district government, who has the authority to run the education. So, it is the district government who has the authority to allocate teachers, let’s say, to run the admission system, for example, to hire new teachers when needed. And it is also the authority of the local government to manage the salary of the teachers. So, that’s the scope of the decentralization in Indonesia. We have two systems between the primary and the secondary school. So, if primary school was under the authority of the district government, the secondary school was under the authority of the provincial government, but overall, now it is decentralized to sub national governments. The central government manages only the, let’s say, the national curriculum and the National Assessment System, in order to make sure that the assessment can look at the overall performance of the system in general.

Will Brehm  5:55
Indonesia is such a fascinating country to explore decentralization because it is so diverse given how many islands, how many languages, how many schools, as you mentioned, and devolving that power down to the sub national levels, sort of creates a kaleidoscope of experiences. It can be very different, and this is where your paper really comes in, where it does this comparative study of three districts to see what’s going on inside schools to try and improve learning outcomes. So, maybe to start, if we could unpack the district of Nagari. Can you tell me a little bit about Nagari as a district? Where is it? What is the socioeconomic status, and then tell me what’s been going on at that level in terms of trying to achieve and improve learning outcomes. Okay, great

Sirojuddin Arif  6:48
Okay. Great question, Will, but before we go to the question, let me give you a little bit of background of the study. So, the idea of the paper is readily to test what we might call the conventional claim about the decentralization. That decentralization, by bringing the government closer to the people, will make it more responsive to the demands of the people. No. One of the problems with the education is the quality. We have heard about the learning deficit, which prevails around the world, especially in countries in the Global South in general. So, now the question is; to what extent does decentralization make the government responsible or responsive to the demands to improve the quality of education? That’s the general idea. What we found is that a survey by our colleagues asking the extent to which the local government implemented new policies to improve the education quality. Actually, the number of the innovation was very few. Only few governments actually implemented new policies in order to improve the quality of education. And we might assume that actually among the interests of the local people is not only access to school, but also on the quality of the education. So, that’s the idea of the paper. So, what explains this question, why do some districts pay attention to the quality while others didn’t? In fact, they have the same system. They are under the same system of decentralized education system. So, that’s the general idea. So, the way we answer the question in order to explain why local government, they have different intention, different commitments to learning. So, the way we answer the question is we selected three regions that we will discuss later. These three regions, they implemented, or once implemented, policies that we believe will have positive impacts on learning. The policies are designed to improve learning. So, we try to explain why this government pursued these kinds of policies, while many other districts, they didn’t do it. And out of the three districts, there are some variations. Some districts continued pursuing the policy, but some districts continued the policy. So, what happened on the ground? That’s the general idea of the question.

Will Brehm  9:01
So, that’s the general thrust of the paper, and the sort of larger question you were trying to understand and unpack. And so, the first of these three districts that you select is the district of Nagari. Can you tell me a little bit about this district? What this district is doing in terms of policies that are trying to support learning, and how you understand the decentralization operating in that district?

Sirojuddin Arif  9:24
We selected the district Nagari because they implemented several policies that we believe have little linkages within the student performance. One of them is what they call as the peer supervision of teacher performance. So, one of the biggest problems in improving the student performance is how to improve the quality of teaching. So, in Nagari district, they invited teachers to study from their peers -how to do teaching in the class, how to improve their teaching practices in the class- from those that have a good experience in doing teaching. And in this case, they invited good teachers to supervise others as well, in the sense that they give some kind of mentoring for other teachers in order to improve the teaching quality. That’s the first policy. So, in the second policy is the family education. They believe that one of the means to improve student performance is how to connect parents with their children. So, the district gives the education for family in order to raise the parents’ awareness of how to facilitate children to study in the house, how to give a good environment for their children to study, how to encourage students to study well. That’s the other policy. The other policy is what they call as School Principal Program. So, commonly, a good head school. Usually, they were given a kind of reward in order to go to the good school. But in this district, the local education office, they had different ideas. Before a good principals can be rewarded. So, this good principal, they have to go to the low performing school. It is not to punish this good performing principal, but the goal is in order to make sure that the quality of education in the district will be equal across the district. So, initially, the idea was resisted by some principals, but by insisting on the idea that finally the district can accept the idea that, yes, this is a good idea for the district to improve the education. So, that’s among the policies that the Nagari district implemented. And behind this policy, what we found is the quality of the local education offices, the quality of bureaucrats that manage the education -that’s what we found compared to other districts. So, now the question is, what makes this district have a good bureaucrat, right? That’s the question. And when we compare with the other districts and based on what people call as the local political settlements, okay, so what we found is that how the discretionary power of the district head was exercised, especially in relation to the appointment of the bureaucrat within the district. So, if you have what we call as a district head, which has autonomous power in appointing a bureaucrat, the likelihood is that there will be a high chance of politicization of bureaucracy. Rather than to serve the quality of bureaucracy, actually, the politicization is to serve the interests of the district head. It will be different if you have a district head whose discretionary power, is somehow constrained by several means -either formal or informal means. If the power of appointing a bureaucrat is somehow constrained, the challenge is that the district head will have to listen to the regulation that is actually in place in order to appoint the bureaucrat. So, the likelihood is that the bureaucrat will have opportunity to develop their capacity in order to do what they are supposed to do. That’s what happened in the Nagari district.

Will Brehm  12:46
Interesting, interesting. So, these three policies that you identified that sort of had a positive impact on learning, you sort of say the reason that these were able to come about was because of this political settlement where the district head actually was kind of constrained. He wasn’t able to just appoint his sort of favorite people to positions of power to do his bidding, which sort of would politicize the civil service, more or less. You had good people, knowledgeable people, in these positions of policy making at the local level that could then help usher through policies that actually were meeting the demands of the local people. Now, that’s quite an interesting sort of settlement that you’re finding, and it is slightly different in other districts that you looked at. So, another district that you identified and explored was a district called Lontar. Can you tell me a little bit about this district and how it compares to the Nagari district.

Sirojuddin Arif  13:42
Lontar district is a district that we might call as a dominant political settlement, in which the district had has enormous power. They have enormous discretionary power to appoint the bureaucrat. So, the conventional theory in the political settlement suggests that under such political settlement, so the district will have a good opportunity to appoint policies that might have long-term impact, like the quality of education. So, we distinguish two types of policies. One is learning enhancing policies, and the second is access broadening policy. Access broadening policy is something like, Okay, you build schools, you give scholarships so student can go to school, right? While quality enhancing policies is a process that intended to improve the quality of learning. For political reasons, if you are politicians, so access broadening is more popular, right? It is easy. The reason is, if I’m politicians, and under democratic system, I know that there will be re-election within five or four years, -usually that’s under the re-election. If I’m implementing access prudent policies, I can claim that I can improve the education, I can build schools, I can give scholarships, I can improve the school access among students, let’s say from 80% to 90% for example. But it is quite different with the learning enhancing policies. It is difficult to increase the performance of students within very short periods of time. Let’s say, to rise the score of students in PISA tests. It’s quite difficult to do it in just five years. The idea behind the political settlement is it is likely to have learning enhancing policies when you have a dominant political settlement. So, Lontara is among the districts that have dominant political settlements. So, the district was run by now we might call a political dynasty. So, there is a family that runs the district since the early 2000s and actually the family could maintain the power to the point that actually there is a competition from local aristocrats who tried to manage their luck in order to regain the power, but the political dynasty actually was able to mute the local aristocrat to the point that they become the dominant power, controlling not only in the executive but also the legislative. So, within these political settlements, the districts had, they have discretionary power in appointing the local bureaucrats. However, despite the negative impacts of this kind of politicization, actually the district implemented quality enhancing policies. They had what they call as the school security guard. So, actually, the goal of the policy is to make sure that the teachers actually work in school. The district had a big problem in terms of teacher absenteeism. So, in order to deal with the teacher absenteeism, to reduce the teacher absenteeism, the district had appointed what they call a school guard to make sure that teachers were in school. So, if say they think that a teacher is likely to be late, for example, or maybe absent for a few minutes, so maybe the school guard, who are equipped with the motorcycle, they will pick up the teacher to go to the school. That’s one of the policies implemented by the district. The second policy is they have a teacher professional development program by establishing a center for teacher learning. So, they collaborated with a national NGO to establish the program by which teachers can learn how to improve their teaching performance. So, that’s how the district tried to improve the quality of teaching. So, the question is, how is it possible for such district, given the huge discretionary power of the district to have the policy; it’s because of the personal commitment of the district head. So, that’s different from the Lontara. The Lontara initiative, or the commitment, came from the quality of the local bureaucracy that they have developed good bureaucrats running the education sector. But Lontara, everything is dependent on the commitment of the district and luckily, they had a good district head who had a commitment to the quality of education.

Will Brehm  17:41
So, it’s quite interesting. Between these two different districts, you could have a different political settlement, sort of as a result of decentralization. One that is competitive political settlement, whereas the other one is a much more dominant political settlement, right? To use those sorts of political economy sort of terms, and so they look very differently, but what you’re saying is, in both cases, they were able to produce quality enhancing policies in response to the local needs of the schools. Now quite interesting, and shows how two different political settlements could sort of operate sort of simultaneously. What about the third district? It is called Kawi.

Sirojuddin Arif  18:22
The third district also has competitive political settlements. So, just like the Nagari district, it also has eight to nine political parties sitting in the parliament, depending on the period that you are looking -so, it’s quite competitive. And within the district, despite the competitiveness of the political system, the power was concentrated within the hand of the district head. In the sense that the district heads, they could maintain the huge discretionary power of the appointment of the bureaucrat. It is easy for the district head to replace the bureaucrat according to their interests. So, we found that just a few months after a new district head was appointed, actually, he replaced many bureaucrats within the district. The district head argued that it is called, let’s say, for the refreshment or for empowering the bureaucracy. What we found is that actually, he appointed his loyalists, his friends, who supported the district head in the election in this district. That’s what happened. So, in the Kawi district, we saw the change of the district head. Under the former district head, the district implemented some good policies that had a close linkage to the student performance. They implemented what they call as the “learning hours” by which the parents were encouraged to supervise their children to learn, to make sure that the children learn. For example, it is expected that under certain hours, devices, television and other electronic devices should be shut down to make sure that the student learn. Parents are also encouraged to provide a good environment within the house in order for the children to learn. This district head, he had a [vision?[ that actually the Kawi district because of the lack of the resources, the way for the district head to be a developed district is to be a city of service, and in order to be a city of service, the basic requirement is a good human resource. That’s why the district head was very concerned with the quality of education, and he implemented the policy. But under the new district head, who rose to power in 2018, the situation changed. Rather than pursuing the district as a city of service, what they had is that actually, in order to be a good city, the point is to develop a good infrastructure. So, there is a change in terms of the vision from the city of service in which the human resources are necessary, to the city of a good infrastructure. So, the new district head, other than rotating the bureaucrat, the district head discontinued the policy rather than continuing the learning enhancing policies implemented by the previous district head. Now, he focused more on access broadening policies.

Will Brehm  20:57
So, in this case, it was a competitive political settlement, but when a new district head came in, you saw the sort of abandoning of certain policies in favor of other policies. It sort of moved away from these quality enhancing policies. So, these three districts are quite different in many ways. They offer different sort of political settlements and how they might relate to quality enhancing policies under a decentralization sort of structure in Indonesia. What do we learn about the ability for local government to respond to the demands of people -as you said, is the sort of purpose of decentralization. What can we learn by sort of unpicking the different political settlements in these three different districts?

Sirojuddin Arif  21:44
The way we conceptualize political settlement is quite different from the dominant perspective. From the dominant perspective, it will distinguish political settlements in terms of the power configuration into dominant and competitive ones. We try to go further to define the political settlements, not into the discretionary power of the district head of the employment decision in the bureaucracy. So, rather than simply dominant and competitive, what we think is what matters from the quality of bureaucracy, is whether the district head has autonomous power or constrained power. So, if you look at the political settlement in terms of dominant and competitive, so the puzzle is actually all the three district, they implemented, or once implemented, quality enhancing policies, despite the fact that they have different political settlements, right? So, Nagari has competitive political settlements,  Kawi has competitive political settlements, the Lontara, they have dominant political settlements. Despite these differences, they implemented quality enhancing policies, right? So, this indicates maybe whether the political settlement are dominant or not does not really matter from the quality of education, what matters is whether your district head has constraint in terms of the appointment of public employment or actually in the power was somehow constrained, whether it’s formal or informal. And what we found is that in Nagari, the district head had constrained power. That’s why it is not easy, although you have to go through certain processes in order to appoint bureaucrats. He cannot simply rotate bureaucrats without  -if he does it okay, the bureaucrat might say something. And what happened is that in Lontara, while despite it is competitive, but the district head cannot rotate as he wished, because there was traditional institutions which has some control upon the local politics. So, if a bureaucrat hears, or if the district head has tried to make rotation, and the rumor has spread among the bureaucrats, the bureaucrat might contact the local political institutions to say something, and the local political institution might talk either with the legislature in order to prevent the rotation. And that explains, actually during the last two decades, the change the turnout within the local education offices, the district, the head of local education office was quite low. We only see three head of the local education offices during the last two decades. While in other districts, the turnover was quite high. We see more than five to six people sitting in the head as the head of the local education offices. So, again, back to my point. The point is where the power of the district head is constrained, or huge or autonomous in appointing a bureaucrat. So, it is constrained in the Lontara district, but it is constrained in Nagari, but it is autonomous. It is huge in Lontara and Kawi. That’s the first thing. The second thing, rather than whether you have dominant or competitive. So, actually, it is whether you have constrained or autonomous. And the path to the learning enhancing policies actually is not a single one. It can be many different parts to the learning enhancing policies. You might have the policies from the competitive political settlement. You might also have from dominant political settlement. But if you have it from dominant political settlement, from the district whose district has enormous power, there is a likelihood that the policy can be reversed. You might see policy reversal given the fact that you might have a new district head in power, right? The likelihood of those districts to have learning enhancing policies is when they have a good district head that have a good vision in the education, especially in the quality of education. When there was, let’s say, change in power, and you have new districts, but your new district do not have a good vision, do not have commitment to education, so there is a good chance that you might have new kinds of policies. That what we see from these three districts.

Will Brehm  25:53
I really love it, because it just shows you how complex decentralization is, right? Where we started the conversation, it was a very sort of simple idea. You bring government closer to the people to respond to the demands of people. But what you’re showing is that it actually is a bit more complex, depending on the exact makeup of local government, how constrained or autonomous the vision of the different leaders, the bureaucrats that might be in, the competitive nature or not. And I think it’s just a really valuable sort of level of complexity that we need to understand to think about education and decentralization, particularly at the local level.

Sirojuddin Arif  26:33
So, I agree with your point, Will and I believe one source of the complexity is the complexity of education policies itself. So, again, the policy can be distinguished into school access and the quality. And in many parts of the world, not only in Indonesia, I believe the demand for the access right, the voice, or the demand, can be louder rather than the demand for the quality of education. The demand for the quality of education might come from middle classes, and usually in the middle classes, they have stronger economic capacity to send their children into maybe private but better school, for example, rather than articulating the demand to public school. But the demand from the access might come from a variety of sources. They come from the people themselves, they may come from maybe NGO activists, when they see that actually the local people, some students, some children under school age, didn’t go to school for example. It is easy to see the problem. But when it comes to the student performance, it is not easy to identify this district has low performance. So, the demand itself is one of the reasons why the policy is complex.

Will Brehm  27:47
Sirojuddin Arif, thank you so much for joining FreshEd. I just really appreciated reading your paper and I think that level of complexity is what I hope more education researchers go into in some of their projects.

Sirojuddin Arif  28:00
Thank you for having me today.

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