IMPROVING THE QUALITY OF PRIMARY EDUCATION (Social Capital and Leadership of Primary School Principal Perspective)

Education in Indonesia still has a number of problems related to education quality, inequality, and governance efficiency, accountability, and transparency. The problem of education quality was found at all levels of education institution, including at primary school. To overcome the problem at the primary schools, the Government of Indonesia implemented a variety of policies and strategies. Although a number of efforts to improve the quality have been done to date, the quality of primary schools haven’t increased dramatically yet. It was because the efforts paid more attention to the technical approach (such as teacher training, curriculum development, infrastructure development) rather than socio-cultural approach to overcome the problem. One of the new perspectives to improve the quality of primary school is by using socio-cultural perspective in education, e.g. by utilization of social capital in school leadership. Social capital can be used by school principal and school stakeholders for improving the quality of primary school. It consists of five stages: developing school environment, developing workplace climate of school, building a shared vision and mission of school, developing networks, and developing norms