Assessing Indonesian Islamic schools’ readiness for the independent curriculum using text analytics

The Merdeka (Independent) Curriculum is an initiative program from Indonesia’s government that aims to enhance education by focusing on student needs and supporting personalized learning. However, this program has received different acceptance from academic communities at elementary to secondary school levels, especially in Islamic schools. Therefore, this study aims to assess the readiness of Islamic schools in Indonesia to implement this curriculum using text analytics techniques, specifically sentiment analysis, text networks, and automatic text summarization. The study analyzed 13,344 survey responses from Islamic school academic communities to evaluate sentiment and understanding regarding the curriculum. A pre-trained Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model was used for sentiment analysis to classify opinions into positive, negative, and neutral categories. The findings revealed that 52.14% of respondents expressed positive sentiments, indicating a strong understanding and favorable outlook toward the Independent Curriculum. However, 36.28% showed negative sentiments, citing challenges such as inadequate resources and infrastructure limitations, while 11.58% remained neutral. These results suggest that while the majority support the curriculum, there are significant areas that require improvement for successful implementation. The report suggests targeted teacher training, improved infrastructure, and continuing evaluations to help the Independent Curriculum be adopted effectively. These findings have important policy implications for educational stakeholders, ensuring a smoother transition and higher effectiveness in curriculum reform efforts.