Teacher Certification in Indonesia: A Confusion of Means and Ends

Abstract

In 2006, Indonesia started implementing a nation-wide program of teacher certification with the aim to certify as many as 2.3 million teachers in 2015 with the budgetary cost of as much as US$460 million. Despite the magnitude and the importance of this program, there has been no quantitative study to evaluate the impact of such program on student’s achievement. In this study, we conducted a teacher survey in the Greater Bandung Area and collected the information on average national exam scores of the students of certified and not-certified teachers. We use two different impact evaluation techniques namely Propensity Score Matching (PSM) and Difference-in-Difference (DD) to evaluate the impact of certification. Both methods suggest that teacher certification has no impact on student’s achievement. The certification program may have improved teacher’s living standard as remuneration increase is an elemental part of it, yet its formally-stated goal to improve the quality of education as should be indicated in better students’ performance may not have been achieved. This program, being the largest in the nation’s history, may have confused means and ends.teacher certification, propensity score matching, impact evaluation, Indonesia