Teacher Certification Program in Indonesia

By Azys Syaiful Anwar

Education is an important part which supports progression of a nation. In Indonesia, education is developed to form well-qualified young generation who will hold this nation in the future. Government has several efforts to enhance education quality in Indonesia. One of them is improving teachers’ quality through teacher certification program.

Based on the Teacher and University-Level Instructor law (Undang Undang Guru dan Dosen) published in 2005, teacher requires having academic background of college degree (S1 or D4) and profession certificate as a teacher. In addition, certified teachers obtain extra salary and other incomes related to their achievement. In other word, they get professional salary as a teacher. This policy is made to improve teachers’ competency and proficiency as a contribution of the increasing salary of certified teachers.

Teacher certification program use portfolio and teacher training program (based on PERMENDIKNAS, No. 18 year 2007) to assess candidate of certified teachers. The portfolio components include academic qualification, education and training, teaching experience, strategy of teaching and learning, academic achievement, profession development work, participation of scientific forum, organization experience in education and social, and appreciation related to the educational field.

In some ways, portfolio assessment creates negative notion in the teacher environment itself. Since there is advance technology, candidate of certified teacher can be easily copying or even producing fake certificates which supports their portfolio assessment. Besides, young teachers with several achievements will not be easily certified because portfolio also list teaching experience as the qualification of the teacher certification program.

The second ways of determining certified teacher is through the teacher training program held by LPTK (Teacher Training Institution), usually including several qualified universities. In this way, young teachers have a chance to be certified. Moreover, assessor of certification program also can analyze directly the candidate of certified teacher. As a result, certification program can be run fairly in the right hand.

Reference:

UUGD no 14 tahun 2005