Indonesia education quality: Does distance to the capital matter? (A clustering approach on elementary school intakes and outputs qualities)

Abstract

Education still become one of many major problems in Indonesia even though it should be the biggest weapon in this country with its number. Inequality of input and output qualities are two of many problems in education which become polemic amongst regions. People said that regions in Java Island have much better intakes and outputs qualities than other regions in other islands. The idea of discussion is related to the fact that the capital city of Indonesia is in Java Island. This research being held in order to investigate the relation between the intakes and outputs qualities and the distance from the capital to regions. This paper contributes facts regarding intakes and outputs qualities as a preliminary research which will be used as a baseline for further research. The research was done by using hierarchical clustering method to all of data of 33 province in Indonesia in order to see their similarities based on the latest Indonesia educational data which had been released by Ministry of Education and Culture. On the data preprocessing, indicators which related to intakes and outputs are separated and clustered separately. At the end of clustering process, there are two different clustering results — one for intakes quality and the other for outputs quality. Both clustering results then analyzed by mapping clustered regions into geographical map. As the result, it was unveiled the qualities of elementary schools intakes and outputs does not depend on the distance to the capital from certain region. It also found that the outputs quality and intakes quality is not linearly related. More than that, it is believed that the educational quality is a function which depend on more complex variables.