Administrative Overload and the Erosion of Indonesia’s Teaching Profession
Ahmad Tholabi Kharlie
(Professor at UIN Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta)
On one hand, Law No. 14 of 2005 on Teachers and Lecturers places educators as a respected profession, endowed with intellectual authority and playing a strategic role in building the nation’s civilization. In practice, however, teachers and lecturers are often trapped as administrative executors who must fill out layered forms, chase document uploads, and meet quantitative indicators that are frequently far removed from the essence of improving learning quality.
What appears to be a technical complaint about complicated applications actually signals a much more serious structural problem: deprofessionalization. Teachers and lecturers lose space to think, conduct research, and build intellectual dialogue because their energy is drained by the need to adapt to bureaucratic logic shaped by various regulatory regimes.
Normatively, the Teacher and Lecturer Law provides a strong foundation for educator professionalism. In practice, however, policy direction is more often determined by other sectoral regulations that carry non-educational logic.
First, the state civil service regime through Law No. 20 of 2023 on State Civil Apparatus (ASN). Teachers and lecturers, as civil servants, are positioned as part of the bureaucratic machine. A performance-based accountability system demands administrative evidence in the form of daily reports, output achievements, and compliance with SAKIP indicators.
This paradigm places educators in a hierarchical relationship that emphasizes compliance rather than professional creativity.
Second, the state finance and treasury regime. Regulations such as Law No. 17 of 2003 on State Finance and Law No. 1 of 2004 on State Treasury, along with their derivative mechanisms for budget reporting, expenditure accountability, and internal and external audits, push schools and universities to produce detailed, repetitive, and strictly formatted reports.
Teachers’ and lecturers’ energy is ultimately “drained” by physical evidence, activity reports, and document revisions.
Third, the regional government regime. With Law No. 23 of 2014 on Regional Government, much of the governance authority for primary and secondary education lies with local governments. As a result, teachers must follow different reporting standards in each region, from local monitoring applications and mandatory program reports to routine public service documents.
Fourth, the integrated data system regime. The obligation to fill out Dapodik, PDDikti, SISTER, e-Office, and other internal applications creates a layering of reporting that is not always synchronized. Conceptually, these systems aim to improve data quality, but in practice, the burden of document uploads reduces the time teachers and lecturers have to develop academic competence.
This lack of synchronization shows that the problem of deprofessionalization does not stem from teachers’ and lecturers’ inability but from regulatory disharmony governing education. Each law operates with its own logic, without considering its implications for educator professionalism.
The Paradigm of Performativity
The phenomenon of deprofessionalization is, in fact, a global issue. Education policy expert Stephen J. Ball (2003) of the University of London explains that modern education systems are influenced by performativity—the tendency of the state to measure almost every aspect of teachers’ work through numbers, indicators, and documents.
Educators are no longer assessed by the quality of their pedagogical interactions but by how compliant they are in meeting formal indicators.
Andreas Schleicher (2018), Director for Education and Skills at the OECD, emphasizes that countries successful in strengthening the teaching profession are those that provide autonomy with accountability—not accountability without autonomy.
Teachers, as advanced knowledge workers, require professional autonomy, not merely administrative compliance.
The OECD TALIS 2024 report shows that teachers in many countries spend 20–30 percent of their time on non-teaching administrative tasks. A similar phenomenon is visible in Indonesia, where teachers’ and lecturers’ time is consumed by documentation rather than academic enrichment.
Data from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Research, and Technology show that Indonesia had around 3.36 million teachers in the 2023/2024 academic year. Meanwhile, the number of lecturers in higher education reached approximately 303,000 in 2024/2025, according to official data from the Ministry of Higher Education, Science, and Technology.
Even so, the quality of professional support and equitable resource distribution remains a challenge. Teacher shortages in several regions due to retirement and uneven distribution increase the workload of existing educators.
In higher education, recent estimates show that the number of full professors ranges from about 8,500 to over 11,000, indicating that our academic ecosystem is not yet fully conducive to producing intellectual leaders in sufficient numbers.
A ministry policy study (2023–2024) shows that teachers’ administrative burdens continue to increase due to overlapping government programs, regional reporting demands, and obligations to fill out various central applications.
Similar findings appear in a lecturer welfare survey in PDDikti, which records that many lecturers feel more like system operators than developers of knowledge.
Both conditions show how educators’ professional work is increasingly constrained by administrative matters that are not directly proportional to the quality of educational services.
The accumulation of administrative pressure has dual impacts: weakening professionalism and reducing long-term educator retention. UNESCO findings (2024) on the need for an additional 44 million teachers globally by 2030 illustrate the scale of the challenge facing many education systems today.
Indonesia must not fall into the same pattern—where the teaching profession loses its appeal, regeneration weakens, and learning quality is compromised.
The impact does not stop with educators. Deprofessionalization directly affects learning quality. Teachers burdened with administrative matters lose space for pedagogical reflection, innovative material development, and personal mentoring of students. As a result, teaching and learning tend to become shallow and procedure-oriented, rather than focused on deeper understanding and improved learning outcomes.
The next consequence appears in the quality of research and innovation in higher education. Lecturers whose energy is absorbed by workload reports (BKD), accreditation, and document uploads tend to produce research that is “administratively safe” but lacking substantive breakthroughs and limited in social impact.
Scientific quality weakens because creativity and intellectual courage do not grow in an overly technocratic ecosystem.
Furthermore, layered administrative pressures erode the academic culture itself. When professional orientation is dominated by technocratic indicators, the intellectual space at the core of the academic profession narrows significantly.
Scholarly discussions, experimentation with ideas, and the pursuit of truth—which should be the lifeblood of universities—are gradually displaced by the logic of compliance and reporting.
The Path to Recovery
To restore the dignity of the teaching profession, several structural reforms are necessary.
First, comprehensive harmonization and deregulation. The government needs to review all cross-sector regulations affecting teachers and lecturers. Every report must have a clear purpose, must not be duplicative, and must not reduce teaching and learning time.
Second, strengthening academic autonomy. Autonomy does not mean freedom without accountability. It means providing space for teachers and lecturers to make pedagogical and scientific decisions based on their expertise, as practiced in Finland, South Korea, and Canada.
Third, designing workloads based on professionalism. Teachers’ working hours and lecturers’ workload (BKD) should be revised by placing intellectual activities at the core, not as a supplement to administration.
Fourth, separating administrative and academic roles. Schools and universities need professional administrative staff, rather than turning educators into file managers. Documents may remain in the hands of bureaucracy, but teaching quality must return to teachers and lecturers.
Fifth, building a culture of trust. UNESCO and OECD both affirm that quality education can only be built if the state trusts its educators. Trust is the foundation of professionalism.
If education is an investment in the nation’s future, then teachers and lecturers are its chief architects. Architects cannot design buildings if their hands are tied by files, formats, and reports.
Deprofessionalization is not merely a technical issue; it is a matter of legal and political choice—how the state treats educators: as lower-level bureaucrats or as public intellectuals entrusted to shape the next generation.
When we dare to reorganize the regulations that have entangled them, that is when teachers’ and lecturers’ professionalism will recover. Indonesian education will not progress through applications and indicators alone, but through clear thinking and the intellectual freedom of its educators.
This article was published by ANTARA on Friday, February 27, 2026.