## **Box 3   Responsibilities for Employment and Deployment of Teachers**

Since decentralization, districts are responsible for employing all public school teachers except those in religious schools. These include all civil service teachers in public and private schools as well as honorary teachers, who previously were hired and paid by the government. Currently, wages for public teachers are transferred to the districts’ budgets as part of the DAU transfer from central government. Even though district governments are responsible for hiring teachers and paying their salaries, ambiguities persist. For example, religious school teachers who are civil servants are managed by the education unit in the Ministry of Religious Affairs (MoRA), not by the districts. In addition, the salary levels and promotional and reward systems for civil servants are set centrally, although many districts provide teachers within their jurisdictions with supplementary benefits and incentives. Moreover, it is still not clear whether districts can reduce the teaching force by dismissing some civil service teachers, as they might want to do if they were to rationalize their student-teacher ratios. This problem is significant given that the majority of teachers at the primary and junior secondary levels are civil servants.

## **Civil and Non-Civil-Servant Teachers by Level of Education**

|**2004–2005**|**Civilservants**|**%**|**Non-civilservants**|**%**|
|---|---|---|---|---|
|Primary|1,108,436|83|226,650|17|
|Junior Secondary|308,346|57|234,245|43|
|Senior Secondary|170,381|39|265,085|61|

Currently, many teachers are under the impression that they cannot apply for vacancies in other districts, but this perception may have arisen because districts often want to retain the civil servants whom they already employ. Nor are there any good mechanisms by which schools and districts can advertise teaching vacancies beyond district boundaries to recruit the teachers who may be the best suited to that particular school.

_Sources:_ World Bank Education Sector Review 2005; WB-MoNE staff estimates.

# _TEACHER SALARIES, INCENTIVES, AND EDUCATION QUALITY_

With the introduction of a new Teacher Law in December 2005, the GoI introduced a new teacher certification requirement which increases teacher remuneration, while also improving level of qualifications. Designing teacher salaries and incentive structures that attract and retain the best and the brightest candidates to the teaching profession is a complex task. This fact is particularly true for Indonesia, whose teacher salaries are considered relatively low. Low pay is likely a main reason that teachers perform poorly, have low morale, and tend to be poorly qualified. The level of teacher salaries in Indonesia, adjusted for purchasing power, is significantly lower than that of other countries.<sup>31</sup> Box 4 Types of Teachers in Indonesia: Indonesia has four types of teachers:

- Public teachers are civil servants who have minimum teacher qualifications.

- Contract teachers are fixed-term teachers who usually are employed through (donor-funded) projects and have the same qualifications as public teachers.

- Permanent teachers are engaged by foundations to teach in private schools. These teachers’ qualifications vary by the quality of the school.

- Temporary teachers work in private and public schools and are paid by foundations. These teachers vary widely in their qualifications, and their wages can be very low (less than Rp. 100,000 a month).

_Sources:_ World Bank Education Sector Review 2005, p.101 and MoNE data.

Indonesian teachers have one of the lowest salaries among these countries and for all scales and levels of education. Teacher salaries from a sample of the World Education Indicator (WEI) participant countries seem to indicate that Indonesian teachers are relatively poorly paid. (Table 14). Nevertheless, the results of cross-country comparisons are not always adequate in this type of analysis as some countries may offer additional incentives that are not captured in the comparison. Doubling teachers’ payments through the country’s extensive incentive structure still would leave salaries below the rest of sampled WEI countries other than Egypt.

31 See UNESCO-UIS/OECD 2005 22