The Key Factors for Education Quality Improvement (By: Muchlas Samani)

The effort to improve education quality in Indonesia has been long initiated. A considerable number of programs, projects, and breakthroughs have been attempted, either regional or national initiatives, and foreign experts’ assistance, as well as the organizers of educational institutions. However, the results are yet close to satisfying. The UN data (which is soon to be substituted by AKM), the results of PISA, and some other data denote that our education quality has not been encouraging.

The question then arises, what has gone wrong in these attempts? Have they not arrived in the main problem of our education? Quoting from Pareto’s theory, do these attempts not touch the critical factor of education in Indonesia? In Surabayan Javanese, have these attempts yet arrived at its ‘punjeran’ or core? Or is it the approach that went wrong? Or are we not serious enough in implementing it? Or, or, and so on. This short article does not aim to discuss the perplexity above, but share the analysis results of our schools’ situation, with the hope that it can provide another view on the basis of research data.

National Accreditation Agency for School/Madrasa has just recently carried out trials on their new accreditation instruments. Even though those instruments are relatively new, if we view from the results, it serves very good validity and reliability. Figure 1 presents the intercorrelation of the items (X1-X11) towards the independent variable (ML=Graduates Quality), (X12-X18) towards (PB=learning process), (X19-X22) towards (MG=teacher’s performance), and (X23-X35) towards (MSM=school management) are pretty good. Therefore, we can strongly agree that the results can be taken as the conclusion.

Figure 1 also illustrates the analysis results of SEM which are processed from more than a hundred schools. It shows that 64% of the graduate quality can be explained by the occurring learning process. Meanwhile, 66% of learning can be explained by teachers’ performance, and 92% of teachers’ performance is explained by the school management. If we pay close attention to those numbers, all of which surpass 60%, which simply can be defined that another factor is certainly smaller.

If the quality of graduates is interpreted as the main indicator for education quality, hence the SEM results can be arranged as follows. Education quality is strongly influenced by the learning process at school, whereas the learning process quality is affected by the teacher’s performance, and the teacher’s performance is influenced by the school management. If we quote from Pareto’s theory, how improving school management and teacher performance can be the main key to education quality improvement.

This finding is in line with Abu Dohuo’s (199) that students’ study results are learning innovations carried out by teachers. There happen to be three requirements before doing innovation, in which teachers must be competent and committed to conducting innovation for the improvement of students’ study results. Well, this commitment is highly influenced by the work climate and this climate is a consequence of school management.

Do these findings also apply to higher education? To date, I have not discovered or read such research in this context. However, if we read articles vis-à-vis outcome-based education, e.g. article written by Eldeeb and Shatakumari (2013) entitled Outcome Based Education: Trend Review, which is related to outcome-based accreditation, e.g. by Harmanani (2017) entitled An Outcome Based Assessment Process for Accrediting Computer Programmes, it might be applicable to universities. Of course, it will be delightful if there exist studies replicating those above in the context of higher education in Indonesia.