Curriculum Reform amid Indonesia’s Educational Decentralization: Policy, Practice, and Outcomes

This paper evaluates the impact of Indonesia’s 2021 curriculum overhaul on secondary-school learning outcomes within the country’s long-running decentralization agenda. Although greater fiscal and administrative autonomy for provinces and districts is expected to raise school quality and efficiency, robust evidence on student achievement remains scarce. Drawing on nationally representative data and employing propensity-score matching to mitigate selection bias, we find no statistically significant gains in mathematics or reading scores attributable to the new curriculum. The analysis nevertheless uncovers two robust patterns: students who attended education programmes consistently outperform their peers, and pronounced inter-regional achievement gaps persist almost two decades after decentralization commenced. Taken together, the results suggest that curriculum change alone is insufficient to boost learning and that early-childhood provision and territorially-targeted policies should be integral to Indonesia’s future education strategy.