A Constitutional Guarantee without a Distributive Principle: Education Financing and Equity in Indonesia

Abstract

Indonesia constitutionally guarantees a minimum twenty percent share of public budgets for education and the Constitutional Court has enforced that guarantee, yet educational disparities between regions, schools, and socioeconomic groups have proved persistent, raising the question of what the commitment has purchased. This study aims to examine how legal instruments construct the obligation to fund education and what distributive principle they establish, to assess the relationship between the current allocation mechanism and the disparities it is expected to reduce, and to formulate reconstruction aligning allocation with the framework’s equality commitments. The research applies normative juridical method with document analysis, examining the Constitution, the National Education System Law, the regional government and fiscal relations laws, the education funding regulation, ministerial regulation on school operational grants, and Constitutional Court decisions, tested against scholarship in distributive justice, school finance, and fiscal decentralisation. The findings show that the constitutional provision guarantees volume without establishing distribution, that statutory principles of justice and adequacy are never translated into allocation criteria, and that the operative uniform per-student grant embodies horizontal equity alone, systematically under-funding remote, small, and high- need schools while decentralisation allows provision to track regional fiscal and administrative capacity, and household contributions outside the accounting boundary conceal further inequality. The article recommends a needs-adjusted formula built on structurally verifiable characteristics, an outcome-referenced adequacy standard, outcome accountability complementing fiduciary compliance, and inclusion of household contributions in financing accounts.