Indonesia’s Education Is Evolving: The Story of How Rapor Pendidikan Helping Hundreds of Thousands of Schools and Local Governments
Back then, Drs. Muh. Toyib Ali, M.M.Pd., Headmaster at SMP 109 Jakarta had a hard time evaluating the quality of his school. “The previous education evaluation was based on the Ujian Nasional (UN or national exam) tested on certain subjects. We actually had 8 Standar Nasional Pendidikan (SNP or national education standards) set by Badan Akreditasi Nasional (BAN or National Accreditation Board). Still, the standards didn’t really address the real issues that we’re facing. SNP only scratched the surface of the education problems,” he told us.
But things have been improving since April 1st, 2022, as the Ministry of Education, Culture, Research, and Technology launched Rapor Pendidikan
“Rapor Pendidikan helps me evaluate my school’s quality through a simpler process. It provides comprehensive indicators that reflect the real condition of my school. It also helps us to identify our strengths and challenges — not only to improve ourselves, but also to develop data-driven planning for our school,” Pak Toyib said.
Pak Toyib isn’t the only one who benefited from the platform. According to GovTech Edu’s initial research, the platform helps many teachers and headmasters across the archipelago evaluate teaching quality and develop plans to fix the core problems in their respective schools.
“Right after understanding Rapor Pendidikan, I set up a team to analyze the core problems at our school. They’re also in charge of developing a working plan to ensure quality improvement,” said one of the respondents in the research.
“Rapor Pendidikan is our reference document to accommodate the school’s needs. It encourages school’s stakeholders to improve our quality,” another respondent in the research told us.
Rapor Pendidikan is a platform that provides data on education system evaluation results. The data is obtained from various instruments, surveys, and systems related to education. The platform aims to help K-12 schools and local governments to identify, reflect, and fix (Identifikasi, Refleksi, Benahi) challenges in the schools.
“Rapor Pendidikan provides data that allows users to identify the area that needs improvement (identifikasi) and focus on the details even further (refleksi). This is essential for Perencanaan Berbasis Data (PBD or data-driven planning) so that we’re able to fix (benahi) the issues to help our users,” said GovTech Edu’s Data Scientist Krisna Aditya.
While Rapor Pendidikan has helped many people like Pak Toyib, the platform also aims to tackle bigger problems — low levels of numeracy and literacy among students in Indonesia is one of them.
According to a study by the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) in 2018, Indonesia was placed in the bottom 10 of 79 countries. The average literacy skill of Indonesian students was 80 points below the average of OECD. In comparison, their average math ability was 52 points below the average of Southeast Asia’s students, the research shows.
As numeracy and literacy are crucially basic foundations in learning, students with low competency levels will find it difficult to pursue higher education and will have low competitiveness among their peers, not to mention they may have lower awareness of identifying hoaxes that are rapidly wide spreading.
“Rapor Pendidikan encourages a paradigm shift to improve the quality of education in Indonesia. Our focus is to have real and measurable improvements each year,” said Education, Culture, Research, and Technology Minister Nadiem Anwar Makarim.
Quality of education, according to Nya’Zata Amani (Nyanya) Project Manager Rapor Pendidikan, is not merely about improving one’s cognitive aspect. “When we talk about Rapor Pendidikan, we’re talking about learning opportunities for the teachers, school safety, education equality for all genders, and leadership (among other indicators). We’d like to improve these things through Rapor Pendidikan, ” she said.
Pak Toyib echoes the same sentiment. During the interview, he told us that Rapor Pendidikan encourages him to empower himself on many levels, including managerial, supervision, and entrepreneurship.
Behind the Scene: The People, The Challenge, and The Dream
In the beginning, developing a nationwide integrated data-based education platform like Rapor Pendidikan was undoubtedly challenging. The team had to collect and work on over 200 indicators to develop a user-centric platform, according to Nyanya. These indicators reflect 8 National Education Standards, which are then mapped into input-process-output components according to Indonesia’s education system, PP 57/ 2021. Consequently, Rapor Pendidikan has abundant indicators to provide a comprehensive idea at each level (schools, local governments, and central government).
Krisna told us that Rapor Pendidikan should be a user-centric platform. “If we didn’t accommodate their needs, they wouldn’t think that Rapor Pendidikan is essential. One of the teachers in our research told us that they might not need Rapor Pendidikan as they can manage their school independently. That moment strengthened our mission only to build user-centric products to support our users,” he said.
While Rapor Pendidikan serves hundreds of thousands of schools, headmasters, and teachers as well as local governments, the platform also provides public data for users who wish to learn about the education quality for every level in each region, such as literacy capability, leadership, inclusivity, and gender equality, to name a few.
“We collect the data from many sources, ranging from National Assessment to National Socio-Economic Survey, to provide comprehensive data for our users. But we can’t just present the data as is to our users. The interesting part was understanding the meaning of these data myself, building a narration, and translating it into a user-friendly visual. We spent a lot of time discussing with the ministry and experts in this regard, and we were definitely honing our creativity throughout the process. Personally, I learned a lot about data story and how to see things from our user’s perspective,” Krisna shared his experience.
Abdul Somat Budiaji Engineer at GovTech Edu shared his story. “We have tons of indicators for each dimension. Organizing and presenting the data in the simplest way possible was quite challenging, but I’m glad my team and I could overcome it.”
Somat told us that he and his team had to build the ground for the dashboard, using off-the-shelf tools that were actually not necessarily suitable to build Rapor Pendidikan due to the massive data.
“Around July or August 2021, Rapor Pendidikan dashboard was finally ready and we wanted to conduct a trial release for our users. That’s when we had our challenge: who is eligible to access the dashboard? So we decided to provide access to headmasters who participated in the Sekolah Penggerak program, which was running at that moment. The challenge didn’t stop there, as many headmasters in the countryside did not have belajar.id accounts that would allow them to access the dashboard. Honestly, a lot was going on in the early days, and we’re glad we’re able to tackle the challenges,” Somat told us.
On the other hand, GovTech Edu’s Product Manager Ika Astutik may have a slightly different experience in data management. “Data collection was a challenge for me. The indicators that were defined by the whole ministry were abundant. Clearly, Rapor Pendidikan isn’t just a transformation for the end-user but also for the ministry. It is challenging and rewarding at the same time,” she shared.
The challenges were also found in Go-To-Market Team (GTM) as told by the team members, namely Maria Theresia, Farah Shofia, and Amarina Ananda Baskoro:
“Each and every region has its own unique challenge. For example, users in and around Java Island are more familiar with Rapor Pendidikan; hence their questions are more about substantial aspects of the platform. On the contrary, users who are farther away need more guidance and details on technical issues, including how to connect to Wifi. The language barrier was also a challenge. Our explanation to users in the eastern part of the country had to be slower to ensure everyone had the same understanding. Those are just the two of many challenges we were facing.”
Rapor Pendidikan was utterly a huge project, and so was the challenge. We are, then, curious as to what kept the team going, tackling all obstacles and giving their best possible shots.
As a Data Scientist, Krisna is proud to be a part of the project that allows him to create a data-driven improvement in the education sector. “I had experience working in the edutech sector back in the day. But the experience was different as the scale was mainly about the private-versus-public sector. I understand that the challenge at GovTech Edu is enormous, but it’s nothing compared to the positive impact we’re bringing to the table,” he told us, smiling from ear to ear.
Similar to Krisna, Nyanya is beyond happy joining the team. She said that Rapor Pendidikan is a breakthrough, the first step into data-driven public policy. “For the first time, we proudly own a platform that integrates substance and data, serving as a benchmark for education evaluation. What excites me, even more, is that the platform encourages a behavioral change on many education levels (Kementerian, dinas pendidikan, satuan pendidikan) to identify, reflect, and fix the issues in their respective fields,” she said.
Maria, Farah, and Amarina from the GTM team, who are responsible for socializing the platform directly to the users, shared their experiences as well.
“Meeting our users in person was truly a priceless experience, and we’re so grateful for the opportunity. Listening to their stories makes us realize how essential Rapor Pendidikan is to improve the education quality in our country. It is an honor for us to be able to contribute to Indonesia’s education through GovTech Edu,” they said.
More To Come
According to Nyaya, Rapor Pendidikan has transformed an otherwise complicated and repetitive manual form-filling into a simplified and centralized process. Despite the massive amount of data, Rapor Pendidikan platform is easy to use, requiring almost no hassle for users to identify, reflect on, and improve their school and district qualities. Gone are the days when users had to work with lots of forms and submissions.
“A much simpler process will save their energy and allow schools to evaluate their performance and develop a plan to improve their quality. It is truly rewarding to see how Rapor Pendidikan brings positive impacts to our users,” Ika said.
“When a user needs certain data, they can just go to Rapor Pendidikan right away. Everything is available on one platform. It’s easy and practical,” Krisna added.
As of July 2022, over 105,000 accounts have logged in to Rapor Pendidikan which half of those numbers have browsed the platform, while more than 65,000 reports on K-12 schools have been successfully downloaded.
“I understand that there is still room for improvement. But, if you’re asking me how I’m feeling now: I’m overjoyed looking at how far this product has come. I’m a big fan of data and assessment and Rapor Pendidikan is everything I love about data and public policy– it’s very personal. And, you know what, I often spend time searching for the Rapor Pendidikan keyword on Twitter. It’s always rewarding to find such heartwarming tweets from people out there. All the sweats and sleepless nights have paid off,” Nyanya expressed her feelings.
Regarding teamwork, her heart is full of gratitude for having such an amazing team at GovTech Edu. “Everybody in the team is willing to go the extra mile to ensure we deliver a meaningful and beneficial product for our users. I couldn’t ask for more, really.”
Though Rapor Pendidikan has helped many, the team told us they’re far from the finish line. The team continuously expands the access to more users, strengthens a more reliable system, provides better data processing, improves the report and dashboard — everything to support users to identify, reflect, and fix the challenges in their schools.
GovTech Edu’s initiative is in line with Pak Toyib’s hope. “I hope every school can access Rapor Pendidikan to pursue a comprehensive education evaluation. It would be great to have more teachers, parents, and school stakeholders participate in improving students’ literacy, numeracy, character development, and global diversity through Rapor Pendidikan,” Pak Toyib said with a smile, expressing his hopes for Rapor Pendidikan as we ended the interview.
