inform policy makers and the early childhood education community in Indonesia about the quality of preschool services in the country and how it compares with other parts of the world. First, when we examine the range of quality using ECERS-R, we find that not a single center in our sample score a 6 or 7 (excellent) on the total ECERS-R scale and the vast majority of services score 3 (minimal) or below (see Figure 2).

Based on these numbers alone, we might conclude that the quality of preschools in rural Indonesia is very low. But if we look across a number of other studies that have carried out an assessment of pre-school quality using ECERS-R, we find that services in rural Indonesia are not unique in their inability to score well on the ECERS-R (see Figure 3). Even services in Sweden or parts of Canada do not score above a 5 (good) on this scale on average. This suggests that the ECERS-R sets a high bar for excellence indeed.

In our textual analysis of comparing the national ECED standard to the items of the ECERS-R, we find that the definition of “minimal” is different between the ECERS-R and the Indonesia ECED Standard. Scoring of the ECERS-R begins by assessing whether all the requirements for a score of 1 are met; if they are, the rater assess whether all the indicators for a score of 3 are achieved. If only some of the indicators for a score of 3 are met, the center receives a score of 2. The indicators for a score of 3 on the ECERS-R are more exhaustive than what is listed in the Indonesia ECED Standard. This is not surprising given that the Indonesia ECED Standard sets minimal guidelines—they are meant to articulate the baseline requirement for preschool services. As a result, a center that meets the minimum requirements under the Indonesia ECED Standard receives a score of 2 on the ECERS-R scale rather than the “minimal” score of 3 as defined by the ECERS-R.

In Figure 4, we show the quality of preschool in Indonesia using two definitions of “minimal”—one using an ECERS-R score cutoff of 2 as in the Indonesia ECED Standard and one using an ECERS-R score cutoff of 3. The graph shows that using a context-specific definition of minimal standard presents a strikingly different picture than the ECERS-R definition. 81.0% of centers in rural Indonesia meet the national requirements for preschool quality while only 42.7% meet the ECERS-R minimum score. Given the resource-constrained environment in rural villages in Indonesia, we believe that using the Indonesia definition of minimal quality may be more useful to frame the conversation for national policy makers as well as the early childhood community in Indonesia. It is worth noting that the results in Figure 4 suggest that poor, rural communities are generally making efforts to meet the national standards. Despite these efforts, nearly 20% of early childhood services still need to achieve even a minimum requirement of quality as defined at the national level. Over 57%of centers fall short of meeting minimum requirements of quality at an internationally acceptable level. As the government seeks to expand access to preschool services more broadly it will need to increase its focus on enforcing its minimum service standards.

# **8. Discussion and Conclusion**

Our analysis of early childhood education quality in Indonesia makes three important contributions to the literature. We find that:

- i. Classroom observations of ECED quality are subject to considerable measurement error. Not correcting for this leads to an underestimation of the association between quality and child development outcomes. Correcting for measurement error using an instrumental variables approach (with the first rater’s score as an instrument for the second rater’s score) allows us to improve the use of ECERS-R as a predictor of child development outcomes;

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