From Regulation to Classroom: Curriculum Policy Transformation in Madrasah Islamic Religious Education, 2013-2025
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15642/jpai.2026.14.1.57-78Keywords:
Curriculum Policy, Islamic Religious Education, Madrasah, Policy Enactment, Merdeka CurriculumAbstract
Between 2014 and 2025, the Ministry of Religious Affairs of the Republic of Indonesia published five major decisions regulating Islamic Religious Education (PAI) in madrasah, ending with KMA 1503/2025. The literature, as it exists, tends to discuss these decisions separately, and to treat weak implementation as a matter of inadequate training, budget, or facilities. This article considers the twelve-year series as an object of analysis. This article, drawing on ministerial decrees, implementation guidelines and empirical study of madrasah practices, reads the series through two frameworks moving in different directions: Edwards’ four implementation variables, widely used in Indonesian literature, and Braun, Ball and Maguire’s idea of policy enactment as a context-bound interpretive work. The analysis identifies five phases and argues that the persistent gap between policy and the classroom is not so much a question of resources. The guru and the madrasah head do not receive the policy; they translate it, and in translating it they do so in material and professional conditions that are rarely considered analytically relevant by the Ministry. Every phase repeats three problems: the capacity of biased and overworked teachers due to the status of vulnerable employees, the stratification of infrastructure between well-resourced and peripheral madrasas, and a one-way communication culture. The increasingly shorter revision cycle just two years from KMA 450/2024 to KMA 1503/2025 is a sign that the ministry is reacting to symptoms rather than to the underlying causes.
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